There are many ways to unlock parts of ourselves. For me, the key was a box of crayons. In 1998 I treated myself to a deluxe 96-pack of Crayolas. I opened the lid, and the scent transported me to the cool green linoleum floor of my childhood playroom, where I spent hours drawing. Those crayons, along with watercolors and pencils, led me to paint my first chameleon, entitled Self-Portrait, the idea being that women are continually changing their roles, shedding and growing new emotional and intellectual skin in order to adapt to their environments. I compose the bits of prose that appear on some of my pieces, words that speak to the viewer about the fragility and also the resilience of both the natural environment and human relationships. Today my paintings and prints hang in homes from California to Vermont.

For the first part of my life, I thought of myself as a "stealth artist," having never studied art formally. In college, I took art classes as independent studies, wading my way cautiously from black-and-white pen and ink drawing into a sea of color under the wonderful guidance of Professor George Chaplin, a student of Josef Albers. Twenty-five years and two children later, I took the plunge into full-color exhibitionism at my first one-woman show and haven't looked back. In 2006, I was invited to exhibit at the Environmental Sciences Center at Yale University's Peabody Museum. The result was a show that ran for one year, featuring an ever-shifting menagerie of reptiles, birds, insects, and other creatures in mixed media. I now think of myself as a working artist, out there selling and exhibiting my work often and widely, on subject matter widely divergent from those first animals (although I do dip back in now and then . . .).

The materials I use to create the paintings you see here are Crayola crayon, watercolor, metalic paint, colored pencil, and graphite. The crayons are applied within the barest pencil outline. When the watercolor is laid on top, a wax relief, or batik effect, is created. Layers of crayon, paint, and pencil are drawn and painted until a fabric of woven texture appears. I particularly enjoy it when viewers can't tell which is the paint, which is crayon, and which is pencil or how, precisely, the image came together. The seamless blending of materials reflects my thought that humanity and nature should ideally function on a seamless, mutually sustaining continuum.

The idea of transformation has been a key part of my work since the beginning: transformation of materials into images, of words into art, of landscape into animal, of animal into human, of human into animal. Over the past two years, I've been focusing more intensely on the concept of transformation and evolution, playing with the idea of shape-shifting, of creation myth, and of gender-bending. And as you can see from the New Works section, I am now wandering into new territory, experimenting with new media, including woodcut and fiber.

I am an artist guild member at the Silvermine Arts Center and the Ridgefield Guild of Artists. I'm also on the board of the Ridgefield Guild of Artists and on the Gallery Committee at Silvermine.