About

Rambling Roots (of an artist and her color wheel)

I guess the one thing I never learned in a class is Color. For that, I had to take 3 months and do some intensive independent study at the age of 54. You can learn almost anything through researching a lot of books and samples. I bought all the color wheels on the market.

The months of research popped out a pancake spinning on a cardboard rectangle because even though the world’s not flat, I needed a simple little game card for doing art. Creating is an absorbing process, and giving yourself a color guide makes decisions easier.

My current art projects are based on jumbles of dollhouse junk gathered by the community thrift store and tossed my way. I put together dollhouses with interiors from Ebay Rizzoli decorating books and the odds and ends Evergreenites donate to charity. Then I donate the finished pieces back to charity through the original thrift store, Echo.

I also have a great family around me, lots of dogs, donkeys, a mule and a very large bay horse. We hike a lot, the animals and I. Our family goes to Aspen and Mexico frequently. I cross country ski now, and swim, and consider the dollhousing my art. I also work on graphic novels with an illustrator in England, John Peter Meiring. Newly published is our first book for ages 8-12, called Cretaceous Metropolis, about pterosaur characters.

As for my education and job history, the tangled roots of which eventually produced the present-day color wheel and kid’s books…. I graduated from Northwestern in 1979 with a degree in English Lit. After working for Jimmy Dean Sausage in marketing, I went back and got my teaching degree at Texas Women’s University. I taught 5th grade in Dallas and worked at Rootabaga Bookery, a large children’s bookstore. Nancy O’Connor, the owner of the shop, let me help out with marketing as well as book sales. My beginnings had their embarrassing moments. I was tongue-tied with David Macauley, Caldecott winner of The Way Things Work. Also, thousands of mailers I sent out had Marc Brown’s name misspelled (as Mark). Marc is the author of the well-known Arthur series, but this was before it was on TV and had toys.

Then there was Rosemary Wells, an amazing illustrator of children’s books, who made a visit to the shop for publicity purposes. She called her daughter Bijoux and we called our baby son Beej. I thought this was such a coincidence, but she brushed it off because hers meant “jewel” and ours was the sound out little guy made when he sucked his thumb and smelled his red hankie.

The Rootabaga experience led me to write, illustrate and print a tabloid of children’s book reviews for 8 years. The Children’s Book Quarterly featured 70-80 reviews in a newspaper format, and several of the largest children’s bookstores in the country, from Oregon and Austin to Minneapolis and Maryland, used it as their primary mailer. 

After having my third baby at age 40, I retired to write. My children’s novel wasn’t terribly good, and I’m the only one who read it, but it was about kids staying in a Maui hotel who buy a pot-bellied pig and chase down jewel thieves.

After that, I decided Life is Art, and started studying and painting with local artists. Sally Davidson of Evergreen introduced my Mom (then 82) and I to the medium of acrylics. David Cuin, a British watercolorist of the traditional, realist school was a longtime mentor of mine. I also studied with Steve Tracy, an abstract oil painter. Laura Mehmert, animal portrait watercolorist, and Tom Ware, sculptor, were my teachers also.

From 2007-2009, I took classes at CU Denver in the Multimedia Department. I learned more about design, film, digital editing and woodworking. I came out of there able to edit a newscast or make a website, and do some degree of Illustrator and Flash animation.

Now my son, the one who was Beej, is working with the Color Harmony Wheel. It’s due to his dedicated mailing routine that you get them at all. He’s also taking over the marketing and accounting angles (phew), so I have more time at age 63 to play with dollhouses and animals and get a lot of hiking and horseback riding in. Basically, I’m the artsy hermit now, and Andy runs the business. Oh, I’m still going to use the Color wheel for my houses, and for illustrating suggestions to John…but I just want to play. And that’s the garden of Life.

If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, please feel free to drop me a line at colormoose@gmail.com.