Baba Yaga is a Slavic witch who lives in a chicken footed house. She is found in fairy tales from Bulgaria, the Balkans, the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and other Eastern European cultures. Unlike anglophone witches, Baba Yaga is capable of both good and bad actions. In many stories she can transform back and forth between young and old. She inspires me and I paint her house in different exotic venues inspired by nature from around the world.

Stories, like chicken footed houses, travel fast. One Baba Yaga house hides in a rhododendron forest on the Sandakphu trek near Darjeeling. Another sits in a banyan forest on the island of Guam. A third stands in plain sight on a clearcut hillside in Sourthern, Oregon- a poignant, defiant testament to magic and humans’ insatiable desire for lumber. How did Baba Yaga manage to evade the eyes of the loggers? Or do loggers know her secrets, and guard her truths from the suburban families that buy new homes?

I developed these pictures to help teach English. I taught English online to kids for over two years as a job. Most of the kids lived in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East like Turkey. A few were from India, Japan, Korea, and Russia.

I also teach refugee kids who live in my state. I use small cardboard cutouts of these images as props.

I found that food is a great equalizer because we all eat and everyone has likes and dislikes. It is also a fun way to get to know about different cultures.

From Football Sunday for families that don’t like football to Easter trees, everyone celebrates something somehow. For me, moss filled, covid winters in the Pacific Northwest became a mandala. A fox happens upon a fairy family celebrating some kind of winter holiday. A rat watches longingly. Some hedgehogs make a snowhog in the forest. A cat biking race goes on, with no clear winner…yet.

I made this scrapbook to remember Jasmine’s fifth birthday party. Jasmine loves singing right now. She wanted to sing happy birthday so many times that she forgot to eat the first slice of birthday cake. All the other kittens waited so patiently, but I do worry that some of her friends thought she was a little bit spoiled. Maybe we can find a kitten choir so she can sing more with other kittens. That way her sister won’t be so annoyed with her. Katie didn’t like the singing.

This represents a sampling of a long term project I am working. I plan to self-publish it someday. It consists of short poems in the public domain about different animals. Every letter in the English alphabet is represented, with a few letters repeating. All the poems are in the public domain. I selected many from antique children’s books I found on Project Gutenberg. Many are poems by women, who even in the 1800s were often writing books and poems for children. Some authors like Edith Brown Kirkland were difficult to find much information on. Others writers like William Blake are well known and much loved. William Blake’s wife, Catherine, helped him colorize many of his engravings. She was an artist in her own right, working as a printmaker even after William’s death. She also kept the couple’s finances in order.

As a lover of history, it is just as important for me to celebrate women from history as it is to support the women du jour.

Postcards from lightly imagined places and somewhat imperfect memories. Stickers for the disheartened. All passed onto you by a slightly unreliable narrator.

From a cookbook I designed and illustrated for the Seattle World School, a public school in Seattle, WA that serves recent immigrant youth. The book includes ten recipes from students, written in both English and their native language.