- My art career started probably when I was a little kid and was drawing all over my parents' walls so that I just naturally, as soon as I could hold a pencil, I liked drawing.

So I had a grandmother that constantly sent me to little art classes in the summers and it just kind of continued from there.

And then after I got out of high school, I ended up at Ringling School of Art.

They had graphic design, fine art and interior design and I just thought I didn't wanna be a starving artist, so I went into graphic design.

And so then that kind of was my career for the first 15 years doing logo design, any kind of advertising type layouts.

I did architectural renderings and then I kinda slowly merged into doing faux painting and more probably towards interior design type stuff, but it still involved murals.

So yeah, it's just evolved for throughout the years.

But probably my biggest love is still fine art and painting and now I'm evolving into that, I guess you could say.

(upbeat music) How I ended up in Madison is my husband's family farm, it's been the family's since 1880, is right outside of Madison, so we were looking for a place to spend summers that wasn't hot like Florida.

And we just ended up, we decided here after a few family reunions, we thought this is really a nice, quiet town.

After dealing with tour season, it's kind of nice to come where it's nice and quiet.

I did this design for the Madison Arts Council.

They were putting out a brochure and were looking for a design for that and for T-shirts, and so I came up with this form.

In Florida, a lot of my clients are like in really nice, big $5 million homes and they want really big paintings and they want something that matches their colors and usually very contemporary.

So needless to say, no little old cars and things like I like to paint or appear, people like the tractors and the scenery and the nostalgic stuff.

So and I enjoy painting that probably.

I like both of them, it's kind of a challenge to paint a big, contemporary painting that's nothing.

I'll do like a little thumbnail, I try to have some dimension to them instead of just great big shapes with, runny paint running down it and so, but, so I don't know, 'cause I like so many genres of types of painting, I just, I jump around after I get bored with something and I'm like, oh, let's try gluing bark on canvas, why not?

All right, so I actually thought of this because getting into all the weird other things that I could glue onto canvases, I had a tree that gives me bark on a regular basis, so I decided to kind of make it a little more colorful so I didn't stain it a little bit with the color wash and thought it would be cool on canvases.

So probably every day, I'm doing something creative.

I come down here even on Sundays when there's no one here and work on stuff sometimes 'cause it's fun.

I had someone the other day say, oh, well why don't you enjoy your house more and stay at your house more?

And I'm like, well, because I would just sit there and watch TV, I'd rather be down here making some kind of art or working on an idea for something, so it's my spot here.

Yeah, this is a Siberian cave bear skull.

So my husband likes weird stuff too.

So we have the paw, like the paw the skull was like $20,000 or something like that, so I was like, well I have this skull, it's just a painting of it.

So it's not the original, but I took a photo of it at the, I think it was Nature's Gallery in Colorado that had them, I think if I would've just gone into fine art only, I wouldn't know all these other weird products that I can use in my fine art.

And I find myself using my faux products all the time on canvases that I'm thinking, well, why aren't they giving this to artists?

Because this stuff is great.

Faux painting, it's been around for hundreds of years actually over in Italy, people that couldn't afford marble would do carvings out of plaster, and then the faux painter would come in and paint it and make it look like marble.

So it really just, faux means fake, which is funny because my license tag used to be faux biz, so people were like, "Oh, you have a fake business?"

I'm like, "Well, yeah, kind of, I guess."

The painting that I am working on right now is for myself, it's from a photo I took when I went to Alaska quite a few years ago and I did a smaller version of it and I've wanted to do a larger version.

It was a kind of a neat time.

We went into an area that the ships weren't able to get into for a while.

And so it was kind of neat that we were able to catch shots of the glaciers and the ice falling off and have a little time in it, but it's, it'll be fun.

Things that inspire me, obviously, like, beautiful scenery, like the Grand Canyons, our national parks.

I try to go through those whenever I'm near any of them, I'll, well, I'll go outta my way to go to them actually.

Other artists' art inspires me.

I mean, I've got tons and tons of screenshots that I take of other artists art to, it gives me ideas, but it gives you feelings, there's some paintings that I look at and I'm just like, that is so cool, if I could go buy that painting and had the money, I would go buy that painting from that artist.

And I mean, I would love to just drive all over the country and visit all these other artists' studios.

I think some artists wanna become famous and be another Picasso and, and I'm just kind of like, I just like doing my art and I don't care if I'm ever famous, as long as I can sit here in my little studio and do my weird stuff, I'm happy.

(upbeat music)