old woman

When I studied visual art at the University of Western Ontario in the early 90s, I developed a fascination with images of elderly people, especially old women. For my fourth-year painting class I did a series of eight huge canvasses, each containing eight life-size images of naked, elderly women. I spent a lot of time sketching lined, wrinkled faces and bodies during this period.

cardigan on the floor

As a child I loved reading Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy books. They were delightfully illustrated with quirky ink drawings, and I would pore over the pages for hours, trying to figure out how to draw like that.

In my early twenties I experimented with line drawing, and some of the stronger pieces came from a series I did of clothes thrown on the floor. I remember this particular cardigan; it was a label called "Non-Fiction," and I bought it myself with money I made working as a lifeguard in the summer. It was a pink sweatshirt cardigan, and was stereotypically 80s: oversized and boxy.

toe shoe

Like many little girls, I was fascinated by ballet. I desperately wanted to take lessons - not necessarily so I could dance, but just to wear the beautiful costumes and shoes.

Luckily my high school offered a dance program as an alternative to the standard physical education courses, and I was finally able to indulge my dream of wearing pink satin shoes.

Eventually I came to realize that the physical demands of ballet were unnatural, and harmful to my body. But for a few short years I delighted in living my dreams.

This line drawing was done in black ink on paper.

crow

I have a special fondness for crows. During my university years in London, Ontario, I enjoyed seeing a family of crows return every year to the same stretch of trees that lined the long driveway leading up to Brescia College. I would walk past them on my way to class every day, and their large, bold black figures fascinated me.

Years later I was walking through an older neighbourhood in London when I suddenly felt something land on my head. I immediately stopped in shock, and moments later the crow that had alighted on me hopped down onto the sidewalk in front of me, then turned and cast me a curious eye. We stood together for an endless moment, staring intently at each other, before the bird casually flew away and I was left to continue my walk, bemused.

Shortly after this I began taking singing lessons, and eventually came across a song that I loved to sing. It was a German Lied from Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise (Winter's Journey), called Die Krahe (The Crow). Click here to listen to a recording (scroll down to track 15). The song tells the story of a man near his life's end, followed ominously by a carrion crow as he walks out of town.

I was terribly upset when the crows began dying in southwestern Ontario, victims of the West Nile virus. For several summers the skies were empty of their raucous cawing and sweeping black forms. Sometimes I wondered if they'd ever return to visit me again. I'm happy to say that I often hear crows now, as I sit working at my desk near my open apartment window.

This is another drawing made with Crayola washable markers, sprayed with water to make the ink bleed.

eider duck

This drawing was inspired by a dream about a waterfowl (an "eider duck") on a distant planet. The image is an abstracted duck as seen from above, sitting on a rock with its head tucked under its wing.

The original Crayola washable-marker drawing was embellished with coloured-pencil shading and cross-hatching.

green man

Another drawing in my Jungian dream work series, this figure is again created with Crayola washable markers and sprayed with water. The drawing was made on the back of a recycled inkjet print, and the text just happened to bleed through the paper at the figure's abdomen.

dream woman

This image came from a bodywork session I did with Mary Hamilton. I lay on the floor, and in my mind's eye I saw different colours flowing through my body. Mary asked me to make drawings of my experience, and this is one of the first in a series that explored this particular bodywork session.

The drawing (using Crayola washable markers) started as a picture of my head, and the purple near the bottom of the page was an energy I saw moving through my throat. I wasn't happy with the image, so I drew the woman's figure on top of the drawing of the face, then sprayed the entire image with water to blur the ink. The drawing was created on the back of a recycled fax, hence the print visible through the paper.