I started drawing as a toddler perched on a pile of telephone books in my artist grandma's Brooklyn studio. On summer days we’d take the train from her house to Coney Island Beach, where we‘d sketch the sleeping sunbathers.
After studying architecture at Cornell, art in London and design at CCA in Oakland, I worked in design and illustration in the Bay Area. I took my work with me when I moved to Hamburg, Germany, where I married and our son was born. Returning to the States ten years later, we settled in Corvallis, Oregon.
The old world cities I lived in inspired me to illustrate picture books set in history such as Mrs. Peachtree and the Eighth Avenue Cat by Erica Silverman, followed by Mrs. Peachtree’s Bicycle, The Blue Hill Meadows by Cynthia Rylant, The 18 Penny Goose (during the Revolutionary War), The Promise Quilt by Candice Ransom (after the Civil War), a picture book re-telling of Anne of Green Gables, and others. The story of Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s The Christmas Coat: Memories of my Sioux Childhood unfolds in South Dakota during the winter of 1945. I illustrated an abridged telling of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables for a South Korean and Chinese children’s audience. More recently I illustrated a second Anne of Green Gables, the full middle-grade novel for Guomai Publishers in Beijing. My medium is watercolor and pencil, sometimes gouache, on watercolor paper.
Links:
I am a long-term member of the Picture Book Artists Association and the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.
2020 new interview with Cynthia Leitich Smith on re-issue of The Christmas Coat
2017 blog journaling/sketching trip to Kazakhstan including the Trans-Siberian Railway
