It's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There'd be no scope for imagination then.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

ZouZou was my grandmother, who had a basement full of all kinds of stuff. After she passed away and her house was being cleaned out, I took a whole bunch of flower pots from her basement, after my mother begged me (I resisted the several hundred aluminum pie plates). I painted a few, gave a few, sold a few, then sold a few more. Then I moved on to other art projects. And ZouZou’s Basement was born.

I actually work in my attic, and like ZouZou, I save lots of goodies, sometimes not knowing exactly how I will use them.  Each day I go to work and am surrounded by paint, glitter, ribbon, and my “paper pond”. In my former professional life I worked in advertising, dressed store windows and mannequins, and taught art to high schoolers for 8 years. I presently teach private lessons to children and adults, and am Artist In Residence at Westminster Canterbury Richmond (in the dementia areas) . I am lucky enough to be able to devote myself fully to my creative ideas and to making my two little boys into good  people.

The animal collages have fermented slowly. I painted various dog portraits for several years. Gradually, my paper projects have become meshed with my paintings so that a large part of my work is a collage of paper and paint. I saw a book called The Zoo by Suzy Lee with brightly and whimsically colored animals on grey backgrounds, and I was really inspired by her color choices. Then I went to my pile of animal photos that I’d been collecting, and also tore up my sons’ Ranger Rick magazines (with their permission). When you really look at the crazy variety of animals that are walking around on earth, it’s mind-boggling. I can’t help but feel a certain spirituality and awe when I see a giraffe, or a zebra, or a peacock in real life! And interestingly, most people relate to animals, and most have a favorite.

Whatever my subject matter, color is always my first decision. Then I decide which animal would look best, with for instance, purple fur. I hope you will enjoy a good dose of color, and have a giggle or two.

The poodle came from my sense of awe of poodles – when they are clipped just so, they seem so organized. I love topiary gardens also, probably for the same reason, and in garden talk, a “standard” is a tree or shrub that has had its branches clipped so that the greenery is just a ball on top. A Standard Poodle is one that has been clipped very neatly, and whose fur looks like a ball on top of her head. I’m not sure if the topiary name came from the poodle, or vice versa. For comparison sake, I made the poodle green and the background raw sienna, to resemble the terra cotta pots that standards are often planted in.

The inspiration for the sheep painting came from a photo I saw in the New York Times Magazine (probably about Dolly the sheep that was cloned). Their fur was huge, like what cartoons look like when a character has stuck his finger in an electric socket. I had done a collage before of a lamb and had had fun making the fur look textural. I wanted to do something similar for the two sheep. I have a large flat file where I keep all of my patterned paper, and it is organized by color. When I went to the white section in the file I saw a group of doilies and decided that because there was a pattern and textural quality, that was the way to go. I especially wanted to create what resembled a neckline like those in Elizabethan dresses, very formal and heavy. I had really liked the painting with the paint on it by itself and wavered about adding any paper to it. I think it worked out.