How I became an animal portrait artist.
It was serendipity that put me here in a studio, brush in hand, canvas at arm’s length, the light against my back and shoulders. My paintings evolve one stroke at a time, beginning with lush color to define the eyes (soul), and soon, there is the wondrous suggestion of a floppy ear, a wet nose, an arched tail. For me, the process is always at once painstakingly meticulous and thoroughly miraculous.This is my domain now, but the hub of my world was once the 4-6x girls department at Lord & Taylor in New York City where I was assistant buyer, choosing styles, picking labels, and ordering designers – all to create a racked universe for the shopper’s choosing. It was a fast-paced, high-intensity, executive training job at the fashion matrix of the US and I loved every minute of it. It was the genesis of my corporate spirit and my entrepreneurial soul and there were other corporate jobs to follow. From retail sales, I became a recruiter, specializing in finding the right employees for companies like Nabisco and Ralph Lauren.
And eventually, I was at a corporate sales convention in Maui when I found myself one day looking into a pool of water in the hotel lobby and, instead of my own reflection, I saw koi fish swimming. I had never seen them before or even heard of them, and they mesmerized me. I shot a roll of photographs with my camera and when I got home, their vibrancy inspired me. I could not explain to my husband then, nor to myself now why, but I pulled out my paints and set up my easel - all tools of a trade I had left largely untouched in the years since I earned my MFA. I liked the color contrast of the water, I thought the koi were beautiful, exotic and enchanting. And then I came to realize that I really had seen my reflection in that hotel lobby, because after all, now I was recreating what I saw in the pool, painting the koi in my photographs, capturing their colors and their underwater movement with my oil paints.
