The Paper Song Awakening

I have always been an artist. My childhood days were spent in rural North Texas making homes for bugs out of flowers, crafting artisan salads for my pet bunny rabbits from wildflowers and grass, and painting with my grandmothers at their respective kitchen tables. Mom and Dad insured that art supplies of every kind were under the island in our kitchen for my siblings and me, and I relished every opportunity to pull out those big containers full of half peeled crayons, colored pencils and well-loved markers. Drawing was never my crowning glory, but I loved it all the same. Making stories with pictures and singing songs loudly with my grandparents were the magical moments of my childhood, I was at home in the outdoors and in heaven on an imaginary stage. As Picasso says, “All children are artists. The problem is how he remains one when he grows up.”

A music major in college, I studied how the human body and mind and spirit respond to rhythm and pitch. A few art professors led me to discover a love for bringing unlikely materials together in the form of mixed media collage. Feeling the paper textures between my fingers, snipping with tiny scissors, or cutting with my knife on the mat become another kind of music that brought healing and delight to my soul. The process of arranging the paper colors and forms on the page shaped me into a composer of a visual song, and these tunes recalled the blissful days outside my childhood home.