"Fia Doll," 3/20
intaglio/monoprint
7" x 8.75"
$250

"Fox Reverie" 4/20
intaglio/monoprint
5" x 8"
$225

   Mood, character, and a sense of story with mystery are the qualities that drive me most when creating a piece of work, whether it is for a portrait in sculpture, a painting or a book illustration. I spent much of my childhood exploring the woods and making up stories.   I grew upmostly in Connecticut then briefly in Oregon and Minnesota through the last two years of high school and spent most of my twenties in California.   My mother was an artist, and my father a documentary photographer for Ladies Home Journal and television.   I knew at an early age that I wanted to write and illustrate books.   Arthur Rackham and Beatrix Potter were my favorite illustrators and at sixteen I discovered Nancy Ekholm Burkertt's Snow White.   It was then I confirmed my goal to illustrate books.

   My interest in illustration was not well received by my art professors, yet I never viewed illustration as a "lesser" art form than "fine art". I feel if illustration and fine art are both at their best there is no difference. Art at it's finest is the culmination and integration of a clever conceptual foundation, strong abstract qualities showing harmony of value, color, and composition; adept rendering of form and perspective, and finally the use of symbolism or mystique in telling a story.  

    I was the first in California to receive a Masters degree in illustration.   After receiving the degree, my husband, Dennis Nolan, also an illustrator, and I moved to the east coast where I began a twenty year career writing and illustrating fairy tales.   I taught briefly at the Paier College of Art and Dennis started the illustration program at the University of Hartford.  

    In 1992, when our daughter was two, we both studied sculpture for a year and a half at the Lyme Academy of Fine Art.    Sculpture was all consuming and addictive, and I had to set it aside to do the book contracts and raise our daughter, but   I returned to Lyme for another year and a half from 2005-2006.   After filling the dining and living room with sculpture until we had no room to eat, I decided it was time to get my own studio outside of the house.   My first bronze bust, a portrait of Bacchus, won recognition in New York and I'm now finishing a small commissioned piece for the theme, "Legacy" for a park in Indiana.   It is really a three dimensional illustration of a grandmotherly - almost fairy godmother, dancing with a little boy and it accompanies a verse I wrote.

    Down the hall from my studio is Zea Mays Printmaking where I am able to go and print for fifteen hours a month.   I love the photopolymer intaglio method because I can draw detailed in graphite and make several variations, and without toxic chemicals. My first print was a still life of a   doll I sculpted after the likeness of my daughter at age two.