CatLinn9

CREATIVE PERSONA A fiction writer and poet in my earliest creative incarnations, I'm now mixing my visual and verbal creations. Drawing, painting, sculpting, sewing, beading, and of course collage, are my main mediums now.

EVERYDAY PERSONA Dogs and cats fill my world, and spending a day in the garden with the rabbits and worms and birds and toads is a perfect day. Crowds and new situations make me anxious, but an evening with friends is the hot diggity bomb. I have a day job that gets in the way of everything except paying the bills, but lack the courage of a starving artist, so M-F I do a long and weary commute.

FAVORITE TYPES OF ART Where to begin? COLOR!—lots of it on everything, canvas, walls, furniture, clothing—in painting movements, the Fauves are my heroes. However, portraiture enchants me and I continue to practice it and hope someday to become adept. Italian Renaissance religious paintings mesmerize me, as do Russian and Byzantine icons. l love studying couture garments and fashion drawing, but am lousy at making both. I adore children's books for their illustrations. Plan to write a children's book and illustrate it—that’s my big goal for 2010. If there were time in my day, I’d work on painting a lot more. I prefer oil and would like to try my hand at landscapes and still lifes should I ever become bored with portraits and abstracts. In my next life, I will be a gifted mathematician and a fabulous Mexican architect and designer who champions traditional hacienda aesthetics. Do I sound just a wee bit insane? That would be because I am. Really.

FAVORITE AUTHORS Amy Tan, Wallace Stegner, A.S.Byatt, Robert Pirsig, Tom Wolfe, W.H.Auden, John Steinbeck, Daphne du Maurier, John Fowles, Gail Tsukiyama, James Clavell, Larry McMurtry, Leo Tolstoy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, E.L. Doctorow, Markus Zuzak, William Styron... I’m having troubling corralling this list…

FAVORITE ARTISTS Maxfield Parrish makes me swoon, but so do Caravaggio, Alice Neel, Larry Rivers, Miriam Shapiro, Camille Claudel, James Whistler, Lucien Freud, Janet Fish, and Edouard Manet. Mary Cassatt moves me to tears, as do Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Frieda Kahlo, Joseph Cornell, Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele... again, I’m having troubling corralling this list…

FAVORITE HUMANS Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Joan Baez, my husband, Dr. Paul Farmer, my friends Dwight and Laurie, my dad and aunt, Jane Goodall, “Professor Mustache” (my world lit teacher), Marilyn Todd-Daniels (my first college art teacher), all drunks in the midnight choir who have tried, in their way, to be free (according to Leonard Cohen)

FAVORITE MUSIC This list will become like the others, so I’ll limit it to ballads, piano (especially Chopin), Hungarian gypsy, west African fusion, Yo-Yo Ma, Gordon Lightfoot, Aretha Franklin, Lani Hall, Dinah Washington, Johnny Mathis, James Taylor, Roberta Flack, Janis Ian… oh wait, I was gonna limit this list.

I'm simply nuts and love the visual arts. If you've made an edgy or particularly peculiar ATC that you're not comfortable sending to anyone because you know they'll send the people in white coats after you, then send it to me. I'll probably love it and will definitely, thoroughly "understand" it. And the only thing I'll send after you is my thanks.