I trained as a Community Psychologist and have a Master's Degree with many years of experience in creating innovative programs and developing organizations in health care and human services. It has been my honor to provide services with some of the finest professionals in this country and to make lifelong friends in the process. My writing is a lot like my painting or my video production. Lots of details that go together well on paper, screen or canvas. That ability to see details has assisted me to secure well funded grants with my writing for years. My first career was very serious business, often life or death for people. Now it's my turn to do what I enjoy and do well. I'm experimenting with painting, writing and comics in different formats, still creating social change, only now for the fun of it, as well as doing the right thing for my communities. My most current work is at OURstoryComics.com .
I’ve painted for as long as I can remember, helping my father with a painting business and hobbies as a child. In high school I designed sets and painted scenery for house packed musical productions with high school classmate and budding talent, Meryl Streep. Thanks to those musicals, my first commission was to paint and construct murals at the National Dental Association Convention when I was a senior.
While I was working on set designs for Peter Pan at Goddard College, two builder/architects recruited me to join a small team of students to design and build the Goddard College Design Center from the ground up. They were looking for “artists not afraid of big spaces”. That’s how my love of architectural renderings, house portraits and landscapes began. I’ve been building and painting large spaces most of my life. This is a painting in acrylics of the Design center at Goddard. Fine art landscapes and house portraits give me an opportunity to study the beauty of nature and the magnificence of architectural designs. Since it was difficult to make enough money as a woman working full time in human services/health care and supplementing with my grants writing/organizational consultation, I began buying, renovating and selling houses.
Along the way I learned about digital imagery, studied animation using the earliest software and rendering from primitive forms at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I studied illustration at the Art Institute of Boston with classes at other area schools for design and illustration. In a very early technology innovative project with WGBH, we experimented with placing video on the net in 1995 with assistance from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Polaris Production, our company, went on to create video destination sites for tourism, stopping along the way to create political cartoons.
Animation and cartooning satisfy my love of motion and create most of the fun I find in my art. In the early internet years we trademarked dot.com, without a clue about defending it from use by others. In 1996, we turned our attention to Flash animation and putting Quicktime videos on the internet by working with a great programmer, Patrick Hart, and perfecting what we believed to be the first internet based editing system using dual G3 Apple servers. We were told by investors that our technology would never go anywhere because (are you sitting?) the entire future was IBM and Apple as a company would never amount to anything. Of course, neither would women in technology....I still have that code. So much for bright investors.
While working with WGBH, my production company purchased one of the first nonlinear editing systems. We used it for editing portions of four one hour documentaries about The Big Dig, Boston's massive highway engineering, waterfront and harbor islands makeover. Then the real fun started many years before cell phones and prosumer cameras. We opened a video studio in Salem and blue screened people talking about their vacations in Salem and flying over the Witch City Harbor on brooms. We placed the interviews and flights into their own souvenir videos of Salem places and happenings. The City of Salem, Chamber of Commerce bought the production as their official Destination Video. Each of the productions can be seen here: Destination Salem, North Shore Riders (bringing the Blue Line to Lynn and Salem), The Big Dig 1, The Big Dig 2, The Big Dig 3, The Big Dig 4.
My renderings of New England landscapes and harbors have been featured at NewEnglandUSA.com . Now that I have the time to dedicate myself to my art work and designs I plan to self publish graphic novels on-line and hope you will visit often to watch the progress at OURstoryComics.com. You can also find art galleries for purchasing my original art in acrylic and watercolors. For posters, canvas or print copies of my work and beautiful custom framing please visit the Artscapes store at Imagekind. For some of these designs on clothing, gifts and more visit the Artscapes Store at CafePress.
For a while I worked in television, co-producing three documentaries on The Big Dig for WGBH and I produced a fourth on the employment opportunities for women and minorities with The Central Artery Project. Many of the video clips at this site are from footage obtained while taping that series which is the largest construction feat I'll chronicle in my lifetime! At that time I also produced one award winning documentary, Sisters Mothers Daughters, a domestic violence documentary that you can seehere and was distributed at Arts and Education. Video clips of construction, transportation, New England sights and travel can be purchased bycontacting me. I still produce some promotional video and short format documentaries. My latest interest is in action video with GoPro and Drone shooting. Those clips and services will be available soon.
Every once in a lifetime someone comes along who inspires even the practical me to believe there are so many wonderful feelings that only poetry can express. Thank you, Jane.
