She is now very famous having done the Lion King on Broadway.

 

My aunt lived around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum in New York so we stayed with her and visited the Met often. I always loved the Impressionists; Pissarro and Monet were favorites.

 

I was also interested in science as a kid, and I played sports, though I wasn’t any good. I have always loved walking in nature and drawing. I still do. I travel to new cities and get to know a place by walking and sketching.

 

Do you walk a lot around here?

I walk with my dog, Scout, she’s a Weimeraner. We go all over: the beach, the woods, the Oakland Hills. There are many trails up there where we can go and I can let her off leash and go into the wilderness.

 

So you’re a dog lover.

Yes, I had two dogs when I was a kid. They were Airedales; Nelly and Briggs. We also had 2 cats, a rabbit and 2 birds. We had all kinds of animals in the house.

 

How did you get into making art professionally? Did you go to college to train to be an artist?

In high school, I was in an intensive studio art program where we had art classes five days a week, and I learned the elements and principles of art and 2D design. It was a very traditional style of learning. I went to college at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. In contrast, the college didn’t have many requirements; you had to decide your course of study yourself. You really had to be self-motivated to go there. Most of my friends left because they couldn’t handle the discipline but I thrived with that kind of freedom.   

 

In college, I had a professor who was very encouraging. He told me I had no choice, I had to be a painter. (Laughs) I did try to drop out of his class at one point and he wouldn’t let me. So I pursued painting and really was able to master the techniques of oil painting.

 

My teacher was named Riley Brewster. He taught a remarkable class where we painted outdoors, in the winter! We put on our boots and coats, and carried our paints and palettes out into the snow to stand there and paint for four hours a day. I had been having trouble working with the oil paint and the still-lives we were painting indoors were not inspiring me, so going out into the cornfields helped me to connect with nature as subject. The extreme conditions really defined the reality for me. I felt like Vincent Van Gogh out there. (Laughs)

 

That kind of plein air painting goes along with your walking and drawing process. You are inspired being out in your environment and painting it as your subject.

It connects me to the necessity of painting. In my work, everything comes from a foundation of what I personally know and experience in a very physical way.

 

What was your work like at that time?

I painted places around the college. There was a herd of sheep on campus, so I followed them around. I did a year-long project where I painted the sheep in every season, day and night. I did a similar thing with the woods, painting the same areas repeatedly to document the changes. I also did parallel projects in science class with the same subjects--sheep and woods.

 

When you graduated, what did you want to do?

I graduated with a degree in drawing and painting but didn’t really know where I wanted to go with it. I needed to make a living so I joined Americorps which at the time was for college graduates. I taught an after school program for junior high school kids in Providence.

 

I decided to go on to graduate school, and applied to a few. I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and got my Masters in Art Education.

 

How’d you like Chicago?

I liked it. It’s a tough city. I think I got my big city wake up call there. (Laughs) Of course the weather is brutal. But it was a fun experience. My job as an artist in the schools was funded by the Mayor’s Office. There is a lot of funding for the arts and great public art in Chicago. I worked at the galleries of the School of the Art Institute, and gained experience with the art world. 

 

What’s it like studying art education? What kinds of ideas did you pick up on?

We studied a lot of education theory, did research and I wrote a thesis on Art and Environmental Education. We did a lot of hands on work as well. We worked with a high school for the arts where the kids would come in to the Art Institute for classes. I did student teaching in a couple of different schools in the city, getting a great diversity of experience. I worked in a school for deaf kids. I worked in another school for severely handicapped children. I worked in a school in the Gold Coast—the south side of Chicago-- which was an all African American school, including the female principal. I rode the buses to all my jobs so I really got to know the place and the life of the people.

 

You sound like a very well educated and experienced teacher. Are you a natural, or what skills have you developed in your teaching career?

I have been teaching for eight years now. My teaching style is not authoritarian. I try to work with the difficult behaviors. I teach kindergarten through fifth grade, so there are a lot of different things going on at the different age levels. Of course it can be frustrating and tiring sometimes. But it is also rewarding and I feel that I have to do it. As an artist, I can’t just work in my studio. I have to be out in society, and I love sharing the art process with the kids. 

 

It’s so important to have art in the schools for kids. They need to have a time and place where they are able to be themselves and release their feelings. It’s a release from the pressures of the academic subjects, and I love supporting them in expressing their voice and subject matter from their own lives.

 

You live and work in Oakland now. When did you come out to the Bay Area and why?

I had a lot of friends and family out here. I came out for a job actually, working for an Edison school—a charter school in East Palo Alto. Junior High. It was a pretty terrible experience; really hard. But a learning experience none the less. 

 

Then I worked in San Francisco at a progressive school, the Katherine Michiels School. That was a great experience because I got to design my own curriculum. I worked with the same kids all day, every day. The school had project-based learning, so when kids got involved in a certain project in my classroom, they could stay and work on it all day if they wanted to. I stayed there for three years.

 

In 2004, I started to work with MOCHA in Oakland. Their mission is that every child should have art in school every day. There are about 35 artists working for MOCHA in the public schools, in Oakland. I work with the classroom teachers integrating art into the curriculum—social studies, reading, science. I teach art lessons directly to the students that relate to these subjects.  I work at New Highland, Emerson, and Rise Elementary Schools.

 

Do you work fulltime? How and when do you make your own work?

I teach full time. But I also produce a lot of work on my own. I have two and a half months off in the summers, and I find that I start multiple bodies of work at that time, and develop them over the course of the year, keeping the momentum going.

 

The body of work you are showing at Mercury 20 in June is based on your travels in Mexico. Do you travel a lot and use that as a basis for work?

I love to travel. I have traveled in Europe—Greece, Italy. I’ve been studying Spanish for the last two years, partly because half of my students speak Spanish and I want to be able to communicate better with them, and partly because I want to travel in Spanish-speaking countries.  Last summer I went to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico for a language immersion program. I made a lot of art while I was there as well.  I took three hours of language class in the mornings, then walked around drawing and taking photos, bringing them back and making paintings. I really enjoy being immersed in the culture when I travel. Just finding out how people live.

 

Tell me more about San Miguel de Allende.

It’s a beautiful old colonial town that has become a popular place to visit. The center of town is full of expensive shops and galleries. The town has become a center for art and artists from all over Mexico and the world. The region of Guanajuto itself is known for metalwork—tin mirrors and lanterns. One of my goals was to meet artists who lived there and learn about the artisans. I did a lot of exploring, looking at art, going to studios. I enjoyed discovering the handmade paper techniques. I learned about embroidery, bead work, paper mache, and pottery.

 

Your work portrays street scenes, cityscapes. Tell me about your process, how you make a painting from start to finish.

I usually work from photographs and sketches. I walk around, take a lot of pictures, make drawings, and get ideas. When I get back to the studio, I look at the ideas, often combining viewpoints from the drawings. I might go back to the site for more information; make more sketches and look at details.

 

For two years I have been using encaustic, which is a hot wax and paint technique. Using the photographs as reference, I will lay down different colors in wax, and carve the drawings into the wax. I rub oil paint into the carving, then paint on top of that.

 

How did you come up with that technique?

After I took a workshop in the basics from Kala, I’ve developed it on my own for the past two years. Sometimes I add objects to the wax, sometimes paint first then add the wax on top. A lot of encaustic work you see is abstract. Not many artists have a style like mine in encaustic.

 

You also use the neighborhood in East Oakland where you live and work, which is called Jingletown, as the subject of many of your paintings. You curated a recent show at Pro Arts presenting the work of a group of artists that live and work there.

We have a neighborhood group that meets to discuss community issues, and we have an offshoot group of artists who do Open Studios together. I had the idea to put together a show of how all these different kinds of artists responded to the unique place that our neighborhood is. In the exhibit we had sculptors, photographers, mosaic artists, painters, all taking the subject of place and working with it. Pro Arts ran the show, Jingletown Junction, from March 18-April 25 of 2008.

 

Pro Arts is such a great East Bay institution. I wish someone would write the history of Pro Arts and how they have served the arts community so effectively for what is it—35 years? They are just remarkable. So glad they supported your show!