AC

My puppet making journey began around 2019. During Covid I took an online picture book storytelling class with Arree Chung and realized I enjoyed drawing and painting animal characters. Coincidently my elementary/ middle school art teaching career started a few years earlier with a multi-faceted project that included the design and construction of masks, costumes, sets and props for a dramatic production of The Chuang brocade, a story about the power of art to create the world. Before this I toured an art show circuit for 15 years selling my well received mixed media monotype paintings. I was ready for my own work to come off the page, although I still wanted to paint and draw. I tend to have a feathery drawing style and found that cutting out my drawings helped me with getting dramatic contours. In creating the puppets, I do many drawings before painting and construction. Though I had made a few puppets previously, an invitation to a show titled Waste to Wonder at a local not for profit reuse organization, spurred me on my way. I had always collected ephemera and now I have found innovative uses for it in my character creations. Recently the difficulty of displaying these semi- three dimensional characters was solved by a random find in a roadside trash bin. All the characters are sweet and a bit irreverent, though I don’t start with that intention. They claim their own beingness. They make me laugh and I love them for that.