I began my art career at age five making toys for my brothers and sisters. Being one of nine children in a family where toys were a rare luxury, I created my own array of playthings. I used discarded machinery, wood, electrical parts, nut shells and anything else at hand which could be transformed into dolls, trains, horses and other toys. A talent for drawing and painting emerged in elementary school and my teachers put me in charge of art projects to display these talents. I was allowed to let my mind and hands go free with play scenery and bulletin boards. After a brief sojourn into music, my interests returned to the visual arts and I spent several years creating in oils, watercolor, pen and ink, and sculpture in stained glass. Then I discovered silk. This medium afforded me a combination of the previous ones with improvements. I enjoy the behavior of the paints on silk as water color but with the brilliancy of oils. The fabric can take on the look of stained glass without the sharp edges. I begin with the idea for an image and throw, brush, or scatter paint onto newly stretched silk with the rough image in mind. The more chaotic the arrangement the better. I overlay this chaos with the order of my image, just as one creates a garden by structuring the chaos of nature. One places certain flowers here, does some weeding there. I allow accidents to happen with both line and color to learn what may be possible despite my plan. When my mind and eyes see what they like, I stop. The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said In the beginners mind there are many possibilities but in the experts there are few. I try to keep this idea in mind when I paint in silk new, fresh, endless possibilities. Not an expert controlling my image, its completion, or what it says to a viewer. I let the arrow fly from the bow. Where it goes it goes. The image and its creation come from my heart. I hope my eyes and hands have been good messengers.

Website: http://home.mchsi.com/~enchanticart/