BIO

I am a hybrid formed from living in many parts of our country.
In youth, winters were spent as a southern belle in Florida; summers were enjoyed as a Yankee in Massachusetts. My husband was an Iowa farmboy, thus the midwest became my home for many years. After he died, i followed Horace Greeley's advice: go west, young man/woman, go west. Our four children and i moved out to the Pacific Northwest and homesteaded ten acres in the northern panhandle of Idaho. Then, with the advent of the "empty nest" syndrome, my winters were spent in Arizona, summers in Idaho.
Each area left its imprint on my soul.
Florida sands, beaches, the ocean's salty moods, its waves gently lapping the shore one moment and the next roiling in tempest as they heralded in a hurricaine.
Massachusetts summers were spent in Williamstown, a unique village reminiscent of a European cultural center, it was choc full of bookstores, each with an art section to die for. The Clark Art Museum is located there and by age thirteen i had memorized every artist's style. Williams College is also found in Williamstown. Similarly, by age sixteen, i'd read all the world classics including Kafka, Dostoevski, Voltaire, Sophocles, Aristotle, Ibsen, Tolstoy .........
In Iowa, i could hear the corn grow. Literally. Soft breezes swept through the cornfields. Farmer's love of the rich, loamy soil, cows lowing their mournful throaty calls as they grazed the grasslands and the absolute silence just before a tornado struck, all had tenure as they impacted my personality.
Arizona's vast desert sporting roadrunners, cactus, and Desert Quail marching in families across the sunwarmed hot sand -- all added a unique quality to my character. I experienced my first earthquake in Arizona.
Idaho. Home to the pristine Teton mountains, the sparkling Coeur d'Alene lakes, the primal forests and winter blizzards. Each has a niche in my heart.

In college, i majored in Mass Communications, and my early career was spent in journalism first as a cub reporter, then, as an editor to four different newspapers.
Yet later in life, a profound change occurred when i studied silversmithing under the world famous silversmith, Robert Koepler. While still pursuing silversmithing, i learned to lampwork glass. These art skills led me to pottery. While writing well is an art, to create three-dimensional art is the joy of life!

Working with shapes, exploring textures, using the elements of design (such as line, form, volume, value), using themes of color, constructing glazes, creating a piece that, while the medium is static, has great movement and depth, throwing and sculpting, -- all keep me enthralled with the myriad facets of pottery. It is an area of artistic endeavor like no other. Always challenging. Always satisfying.

And in the final analysis, there has never been such a feeling of anticipation in any other area of art as magical as that moment when opening the kiln after the final glaze firing to see the fruition of a piece born from the ashes into maturity.
Chae