My first connection to creativity was the alphabet. As a child I loved to draw the twenty-six letters. All through elementary school I experimented with the shapes, often in the margins of my math notebooks.  In high school, I volunteered to make posters for sports events.  Getting to write really BIG was thrilling. In art class I liked to include the name of the object in the drawing. Word and image went together for me.  After studying dance and ceramics in college, I took this understanding of movement and form and dove into the study of calligraphy: the art of beautiful writing.

In the 1970s I was living in Berkeley, California, where a renaissance of book arts was underway. I rented a storefront and hung out my shingle as a calligraphic designer, drawing out the alphabets of the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance as my “palette of colors”.  

I loved studying the manuscripts in the Rare Books Room of the university library. The variations in the ink, the texture of the vellum skins, the little mistakes and complaints written in the margins by the scribes - it was all so alive. The alphabets were like windows into their times, just as handwriting can be a window into one’s personality. They also connected me to the rich history of bookmaking.

Looking back I see that my interest in illustration followed a similar path to those medieval scribes. At first I worked with just the simple beauty of the letterforms, then I began to illustrate in relation to them. I became curious about the natural world and wanted to know more.

In 1979 I moved to Boulder, Colorado at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. I met the naturalist Audrey Benedict and we began to collaborate on a guide to the Southern Rocky Mountains. She took me up into the tundra and out to the grasslands, showing me the interconnectedness within an ecosystem. I looked and listened and sketched and wrote. I started to see the world with a naturalist's eye.

I also began combining calligraphic expression with botanical watercolors. Here is a painting I gave to my teacher Chögyam Trungpa. You can read the story of how that exchange unfolded here.

My inspiration to create children’s books grew out of this interest in the interrelatedness of word and image extending through a series of pages to create a visual story. I went looking for these stories of connection in the natural world, focusing first on trees. When I read that the saguaro cactus was pollinated in the night by long nosed bats I knew this was the place to begin ! It was crucial in my research to experience these environments firsthand. Sitting down, observing closely and drawing on the spot became central to the integrity of the work. Here is a page exploring the many forms of banyan trunks.

And patterns in India -

I traveled to Arizona to see the saguaro cactus, and to the Pacific Northwest to sit in the quiet of the old growth forest. For Urban Roosts, I walked all over New York City, finding birds' nests on skyscraper ledges and deep in the train tunnels below Grand Central Station. For Shadows of Night, I witnessed a twilight emergence of 100,000 bats flying out of an abandoned mineshaft in southern Colorado. Phantom of the Prairie took me to the grasslands of Wyoming. I traveled to India and Bali for In the Heart of the Village, recording the activity around the sacred banyan trees. I went to East Africa and drew under giant baobabs (and had my brush snatched by a monkey soon after this picture was taken ! )

The freshness and immediacy of these sketchbooks drew me to a looser illustration style and a more personal writing voice. This is what I followed in the creation of True Nature : An Illustrated Journal of Four Seasons in Solitude. Throughout the journey of all these books I have listened for what is alive and true and intimate. The world can open when we look closely and bring something of what we see, and who we are, to the page.