What inspires me about this work?

I wanted to begin to answer the question what inspires me about this work?
First, I love Elizabeth's stories and I am fascinated (as we both are) by the richness of the source material. Really one could work from this material for ever.

Elizabeth's stories are as poignant as they are funny and brilliantly composed (I promise, soon I will include more) and I kind of enjoy not so much illustrating them as reading rereading listening and responding to the qualities in them and allowing the imagery to draw itself. My hand just draws her stuff really effortlessly(almost).

The depth of the history of these original stories keeps me desiring to explore them in images until I find my own answers. They are for all of us, they teach and they express and they play with our imaginations and they heal.

But they also offer profound truths. The essence of all the stories has to do with the healing power of the feminine. To me (to us) this is a crucial component of this whole body of work. As we keep our dedication to its evolution and development as artists in the atmosphere of a troubled world in need of healing we have this in mind. More about this as we go. Comments desired.

Elizabeth and I have been collecting work for over 12 years we will continue to do so.

Also, (for me personally) the power of the skirt as icon, image, expression, my love of the skirt as an imaginative transformative garment has been part of my vocabulary as an artist and my iconography forever. It is simply always there.

15 years ago I created a show called My Mother's Skirts which was an exploration of the profound impact of remembered gestures of my mother in her skirts.

Here is one of the images from that show called The Skirt as a Barrier. These are mainly scratch drawings, a technique I basically modified for my own uses from silverpoint (an ancient for of drawing on gesso with silver).