Text as design and inspiration

Artist Trading Card with a background of newspaper from India and a Chinese fortune cookie fortune

I love the use of text as a design element. I know that a lot of other artists are also inspired by and incorporate text into their work. I adore the way Karen Stiehl Osborn uses text, Rayna Gillman does beautiful things with letters, and Virginia Spiegel has a way with words, just to name a few. I don't know whether my affinity for the use of all things alphabetical is linked to my colored-grapheme synesthesia or not but I do know that I find it a very satisfying inspiration.

Sometimes the forms of the letters are pure design elements for their shapes, used as background noise, as in this piece from my Climate series.

Sometimes the letters or numbers are large and central to the piece but don't "say" anything.

Sometimes the letters spell something relevant.

I can't get enough letters and numbers. I have over 600 fonts installed on my computer and subscribe to a bunch of font newsletters. You might say that I'm a font junkie. I'm such a letter nerd in fact that I print out and collect the Type Trading Cards from ITC (International Typeface Corporation) each month. They're like ATCs, but with font history and fun facts.

I also collect lots of things that have text on them to use in my work. I have scores of fortune cookie fortunes -

Maps -



Old music scores -



Pages from falling-apart books -



Reproductions of old money or letters -



Postage stamps -



And of course, paper and stamps with other languages.

Handmade paper with Korean characters -



A newspaper from India -



And more alphabet stamp sets than you can shake a stick at - in every size from 1/4" to 3" high, and several character sets.



I've been playing with layering text of different scales, different languages, different colors, to say something and just for the forms. I can think of so many more directions to explore.





I found some really neat letters made of recycled tin cans in a catalog recently. The letters are about 8" high and 1.5" deep. Because they were on sale, the company was out of a lot of letters and only had two vowels left (u and o). It made spelling something out a little challenging, but I did think of a great word for my studio, as you can see!



My husband walked in right after I hung them up (probably attracted by the hammering) and wanted to know why the wall said "spout". Silly boy...

Inspiration from unexpected sources

just one thing 8" x 8"

Inspiration can come from unusual directions - a color combination, a concept, a societal issue, a song, a word or phrase may be fascinating and compelling enough to inspire a work of art or a series of works. One thing I've been thinking a lot about recently is climate change. I've been working on a series using beetles to represent the effects of global warming on nature and her creatures. Carl Sagan, one of my childhood heroes, used to say that the only living thing that had a chance of surviving a nuclear holocaust would be a cockroach.


Beetles are more appealing to me, yet symbolize that tenacity of existence that Sagan alludes to with their hard shells, their armored protection against predation and assault. At the same time there is something innately fragile about a beetle's carapace, so easily crushed by force, so vulnerable to chemicals and toxins. The earth itself is, like the beetle, a juxtaposition, strong and fragile, enduring and in jeopardy.

The overall series on climate change is entitled Caída Libre, "free fall" in Spanish. I've made pieces as large as 9" x 12" in this series and as small as 1.5" square. More of these tiny pieces are shown here. There's something in the air, because Terry Grant has been working on itty, bitty art too.


My husband, Carlos, is an oil painter and it's energizing to live and work in close contact with another artist - especially one working in another medium. His sources of inspiration are as varied and interesting as anyone I've ever known. The vast majority of his work is abstract. He works large (especially compared to me!), often 5 feet by 7 feet or greater, and with a heavy impasto. His current series is inspired by photographs of fancy chickens. The forms, shapes, colors and textures found in poultry is an admittedly unlikely thing to inspire a whole series of giant, abstract paintings, but there it is. I don't think it's necessary that the viewer know an artist's source of inspiration, but it can definitely add something to the experience.

Teeny, tiny art

One of my favorite books by Murakami has a line in it about creating: "The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape." I like that image - transposing consciousness into color and shape.

The SAQA group that meets in Somers NY every month set ourselves a small (keyword: small) challenge for June. I handed out some 1.5" chipboard squares to collage on, called bazzill chips. I had a lot of fun in this tiny format. I've decided I've been playing a kind of "visual limbo" lately. How low can you go? My average size of work is in the 9" x 12" and 10" x 13" range. I've been making 8" squares and 6" squares in a new series. I make a lot of fiber postcards that are 4" x 6". I've done atcs. But boy, 1.5" is really small. I know there are a lot of artists out there working on the 1" squares, but 1.5" is maybe as small as I'd want to go.


I experimented with a couple of new materials and plan to use them in some larger pieces. The left side of the chip is wrapped in copper foil tape and the other three sides (and the back) are painted with pearlescent liquid acrylic, which has the consistency of ink, is slightly sheer and is highly metallic. And yes, I have beetles on the brain.

I need to make more of these...

fuera de control

New work from a series about climate change - fuera de control 6" x 6"