“How long does this take?”  “Where did you learn how to do this?”  These are this artist’s most asked questions.

The largest complicated sculptures (16” x 20”) can take as long as six months.  Small, 2 ½” x 3 1/2 “  projects, require four to five days.  The artist majored in art education and fine arts at Florida Atlantic University and taught all grades in Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina for forty one years. She came across a book on paper sculpture twenty years ago and, in this medium, is totally self-taught.

Whether flowers, fur, feathers, or fins, every sculpture requires different procedures and techniques.  Each is unique with its own set of challenges, things to be discovered, something new to be figured out and tried.  Love of detail pushes her beyond the simplicity rendered by some other paper sculptors who depict detail by adding paint, pencil or pen.  Always, her quest is respectful representation of what Another’s hand has made.  The joy for this artist is not arrival at the destination, a completed piece, but the knowledge and experience gained in the journey of getting there.

This artist’s passion continues to be capturing the elegance of lines drawn by shadows on white paper formations that fluctuate between two and three dimensions, and transforming vellum into the illusion of wings and water.

Her journey began in the foothills of West Virginia, loving cutting paper dolls and their dresses, and new crayons and scissors.  The seed for paper sculpture was likely planted in junior high school when she began to design and cut her own patterns for clothing she would sew.

She has traversed country roads, sandy beaches, and cobble stone streets experimenting with watercolors, acrylics, pen and ink, and colored pencils, while trying to figure out all the possibilities of working with paper.  Time and trial have transformed her from the shy six year old enamored with paper dolls to an old broad who still absolutely loves acquiring new knowledge, figuring out how to make paper do what she wants, and, of course, new scissors!