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How it all began
I think in pictures and those pictures tell stories. I was raised among creators and watching them started me on my own art journey to share with others what I see in my head. I was that kid who volunteered to clean the art teacher's studio where questions could be asked and art tools touched. I was an art major in college as painting was my main love. But when I met a major fork in the road, security won out for a life as a tenured professor in International Affairs. The artist in me couldn't resist, so I wrote about urban design and art as propaganda. Throughout, I never stopping creating and always made precious time for art. The next time opportunity knocked, I took the artful path.
Embrace what comes
Soon I was painting not just pets and their owners, but children, family homes, exotic animals, landscapes including the Driftless region in southwestern Wisconsin and the vast landscapes of the American West.
I'm a licensed instrument-rated pilot with a thousand hours aof in-command time, so the beauty of planet patterns, seasonal color and amazing textures filtered into my art with real airplanes and their owners painted in flight over favorite, most memorable places. It was during this period that I formally established Light Pixie Studio. Two decades later I continue to find delightful image challenges of all kinds and return customers.
I’ve always kept a garden of beautiful flowers, first in colorful Miami and now in the Midwest.. Each morning begins with new things that have blossomed, deadheading what’s spent, making plans to move or divide, and browsing the catalogues for what else might be grown. I am in love with flowers, paint them with a passionate heart, and enhance some of them with real gold. Flor Amore (for the Love of Flowers) is now the main gallery at my online store, filled with paintings of flowers and their pollinators. Each of them represents the joyous side of my art for the pleasure it gives me in creating them and for those who, like me, have fallen in love with the magic of nature.
Click below for my philosophy on life and art, part of an interview with Bold Journey, March 2024
Turning the corner
Twenty years ago my portrait commissions had a wider audience just as I was getting sick from the volatile esters in the paint. I tried alternatives and learned photography, doing digital restoration and physical repair for others. As these skills grew, I rediscovered my passion for painting from my own imagination once again. I now work and paint mixed-media including pastels, water color, and pigmented ink to release tales of rich color and beauty into the world.
I'm proud of my art and love meeting so many interesting people as a result, many of them remaining in my life as friends.
Lucky me, lucky us!
My husband Paul is my best friend. We were born and raised in the Midwest but careers took us to Miami where we met and married thirty-four years ago in the tower of the Biltmore.
More recently we returned to the Midwest and the Big City girl now lives in a very small town forty miles east of the Mississippi River in a region called The Driftless. It's a place bypassed by the glaciers of the last three Ice Ages, a uniquely beautiful area of deeply carved, narrow valleys, hardwood forests and grassy meadows. Trout streams and lakes fill irregularities never scoured flat by ice. Our home is high above town, enough to see far and wide.
Some of the best skies in my portfolio are from my studio window. The richness of color comes from the decades in Miami.
Personal life
We met on a street corner in our underwear. Go ahead and laugh . . . running the Miami Marathon relay! And we’re still at it. Our children are grown and our every day ends on a date.
More good stuff!
I love to share the new pieces I’m working on, offer special discounts, and giveaway a fine art print or quality merchandise with my artwork to one of my subscribers every month. I’d love to have you join me in this artful journey!
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Have questions? Just want to chat about art?
Another happy, returning customer
Technique + Imagination
My strategies and processes are very like how I was trained. I sketch loosely, then block in color, shading and shadowing, painting the background first, then details followed by refinements, wait a few days, review and revise, rinse and repeat.
Once I decide the art is finished, I sign-date-title it. Everything is handmade using pastels, alcohol and pigmented inks, and other enhancements including gold leaf on heavy fine art papers or canvas. Everything in or on the original is archival for highest quality and longest life.
Originals and limited edition prints are marked discretely with my embossed logo and cypher to certify that status.
What I create--my real product--is beauty, with happiness baked into each work of art.