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So, you want to
know about
the woman on the other end of the paint brush? I am an Alaskan.
I paint murals in homes, paint pictures for sale and commission
and dabble in various media of printmaking. When I am not painting
for a specific commission, my preference is to paint "what
is not there." I do not consider myself a reproductionist.
Although I have great esteem for people who paint exact copies
of a landscape, or capture the inner glow of a bowl of fruit,
my own interest lies inside my head where unlikely scenarios unfold
and fanciful creatures are free to comingle. These are the characters
of my artwork and their imagined antics are what I take most pleasure
in depicting.
Like
so many in Anchorage, I am a transplant. I came to Alaska seeking
adventure and wild places, and happily found both. I enjoy hiking,
telemark skiing and snowshoeing in the mountains around Anchorage,
and sea kayaking each Summer in Prince William Sound. The beauty
of Alaska inspires my artwork, but it is the playful nature of
its inhabitants, both human and animals which is more likely to
show its face in my paintings.
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I
got my start in the creative business world while in college in
Middlebury, VT when Ian Moore and I started Gimme Dat Hat Company
as a dorm-room sweat shop in 1990. Our fleece elf and dwarf fleece
hats sold well around campus my last couple of years in college,
so after graduation I took our products to the greater New England
marketplace, selling wholesale to sports shops and galleries.
Ian and I moved
up here to Alaska in 1994 and Gimme Dat Hat Co. really took
off. I found that my true delight in the hat business lay in
the designing of new hats. I added two dozen whimsical Alaskan
animals to the hat line and began selling in gift shops from
Bardarson Studio in Seward to the King Eider Hotel on St. Paul
Island. We sewed Alaska Flag hats for one catalog, polar bears
for another and pretty soon the company had thirty or forty
wild animal styles from bulldog to wallaby to lobster; I never
turned down a request.
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In 1999, Ian
and I bought 75 acres of ridge and hilltop property outside
Anchorage and began the new laborious yet creative task of building
our own home. We felled trees, milled timbers, cut joints and
pegged together our timberframe shop the next year.
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All good things
must come to an end, and summer of 2001 I shut down the hat factory,
deciding to shift my lifelong quest for creativity to painting
murals. I had studied printmaking at the University here for several
years and had done a number of commissioned door murals for friends
and neighbors, but realized that while working at Gimme Dat Hat
and also working as an activities therapist for a psych hospital,
I wasn't ever going to get far with my artwork unless I devoted
myself to it.
The artwork shown
on these and other pages of my website serve as a glimpse into
the work I have been doing in the past couple of years. Please
feel free to contact me with any ideas of how my artwork might
fit into your home or place of business.
gimmedat@gci.net
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