I no longer have any art work that I did between the age of three and my early twenties, other than one or two pieces that are now on relatives’ walls. I would love to see some of that lost work today.
I have, however, kept a small sketchbook and index cards from the late 1960s when I was between twenty-one and twenty-three. The drawings in and on them marked an important step in my creative life. They arose from my scribbling with felt pens or pencil and seeing what the lines suggested to me. This process felt like looking for shapes in changing clouds. I don’t know how I thought of doing this, except that this way of working felt freeing to me.
I carried this intuitive approach into the printmaking that I began in my mid twenties and into many of the different media that I’ve worked with. I’ll show you some examples from an oracle card deck I made in the 1990s. Although some planning was involved, the drawings that I turned into linocuts came about from scribbling and developing images from there. (I’ll write more about Mirrors of the Heart cards in further posts.)
Arts of May 