In fifth grade, my class laughed at my drawing. I felt the first sting of rejection; the drawing was me, the artist. Time melted in art rooms, studios, or outdoors, wherever I was working.

After college, I tried to forget all the tenets of Abstract Expressionism that now were meaningless. With six children, I had little time and no money. My pencil and small sketchbook went everywhere, figure drawing at night and observing nature during the day. I never lost the foundation of abstraction but was layering it with connections to the world around me.

Etching was my first graphic medium. I studied with Deborah Cornell at the Experimental Etching Studio, the first print cooperative in Boston. On the basis of my portfolio, I was offered a part-time job teaching etching at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts with Vaino Kola. He suggested I get a Master of Fine Arts degree. My children were all in school so I had a sliver of time. At the Museum School I focused on lithography. At Tufts University, prominent women art historians, Madeline Caviness, Medievalist introduced me to medieval manuscript; Elizabeth Swinton an Orientalist, brought old Japanese books to my attention. Their influence later appeared in my work.

For my MFA exhibition, I needed solitude to create a body of work so I left my home for Monhegan Island, Maine. Here I drew alone for weeks. These drawings formed the basis for the lithographs shown at this exhibition. Later, the Mac Dowell Colony offered solitude but with an important difference. I met composers, writers and other visual artists. My dinner conversations with a poet led to my first artists’ book.

Those were busy years, teaching part-time, attending graduate school, and shuffling my adolescents into college. I continued to teach studio courses for twelve years at Wheaton. Soon my own ideas demanded more attention; it was time to leave for my own studio.

Working on paper is a wide-open field. Two different projects can be in process simultaneously; one project (artists’ book) takes over a year to complete while a collage is complete in a month. In the studio, boredom is non-existent.