Dare 2 Feel

This is a page from my first published book, PUP IN SCHOOL (Crown Books for Young Readers). I created this book because when I was teaching at the wonderful The Atrium School in Boston, I noticed that when I wanted to talk about ways we could get along better together in class, using animals rather [...]

It interests me how our thoughts are like holograms in our minds, or movies, just a few actions away from becoming “real”. One decision can pull the holographic idea from mid air, into your hands. It’s that decision which drives the creative outcome in a way, because unless we act on our creative drive, the [...]

Babies are no fools. They sense and see and feel exactly what is going on around them. They’re innocent, though, too, in that they are vulnerable and subject to our actions and choices. And, they’re learning how to deal with motor skills and how to handle all that sensory in-put. They’re amazing. I believe the [...]

Dreamed of a pool in an interior space, right on the shore. An enormous surprise wave came, followed by another, with the sea crashing into the pool area. The second wave became a wall of water, and stayed that way (a clear wall made of water). Other waves came and went. Water walls rose and [...]

My entire childhood, during school, I was secretly studying people visually, how they looked, how they moved, how light and shadow defined their features, what the space around them looked like. I pretended to go along with the teacher’s agenda, but the visual rapture of the human figure was where I beamed my true focus [...]

Automatic drawing, drawing in a trance-like stream 0f consciousness, is fun and surprising. My sketchbooks are full of such drawing meditations. You don’t know who will come visit you on the paper.  I go with the feeling, the flow of the ink. Then I get to know these drawn characters, and myself, a little better.
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At the start of summer, I was at Compo Beach and saw a nice elderly gentleman reading a book. His hat was floppy (I liked that about him). H got up and ran into the water for a dip, and sat back down to read. I wondered then who he was and imagined he was [...]

This is a study of a child rider, one of the many I made before writing and illustrating A BLUE RIBBON FOR SUGAR. There is nothing more wonderful than studying the movements and linear grace of children, but drawing horses in motion is just as hypnotizing.  I probably love no other occupation as much as [...]

Today is my dad’s birthday, and it is also Bastille Day in France.  I never considered my dad’s birthday in anyway very connected to Bastille Day until I got older and was eating at a French restaurant with my future-husband in the Meat Packing district of NYC . I called my dad from a pay [...]

I did this art piece recently for a travel site called Farewell Travels, www.farewelltravels.com. It is an excellent site and I was honored to do this piece. I keep thinking that traveling is often the best thing for the spirit. You get a new perspective, you swim in new energy and new sights, you realize [...]