Almost anything could inspire her and become part of her heart and art. She paints, she sculpts, she prints, she stencils, she photographs, she handstamps, in other words, she does it all. Quite often she focused on the relationship between mankind and nature for her inspiration. After a trip to Japan in 1988, her Harvest series began after she was inspired by Japanese seed catalogues that she collected while overseas. Her Natura series originated in 1990 while paying attention to the natural world. Using handmade and antique rubber stamps, she incorporated repetitive marks to represent single trees, orchards, grasses, birds, shells and flowers. My toy bridle from a Breyer’s horse collection that came on a yellow piece of folded paper, which looked exactly like a horse head, inspired Horseplay. In 1990, she became enamored with cuneiform marks, pictographs, hieroglyphs and ideograms. She found antique and modern rubber stamp sets from local antique stores and started creating her Word Prints series, which were inspired from Lao Tsu, the Bible, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. From 1997-2000, she worked with a blacksmith and fellow artist at a monastery in Connecticut. One idea followed another from drawing to sculpture and back again to drawings. The logo of Fethra Prints is from her print Horse Feathers. Real feathers were selected, trimmed, arranged and glued to follow the musculature of the head. An artist residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation inspired Fall Gathering. Within a few days of living in her own little cabin, she embraced the new rhythms of aloneness. She watched the late summer turn to Fall, taking multiple walks through the woods daily, collecting hundred of leaves which were carefully washed, dried, pressed, sorted, repaired and imprinted on paper and gessoed wood panels. On February 14th, 2004, she received a beautiful box of chocolates and a new series titled Heart’s Content began. This marked the introduction of working with stencils. The technique of these works on paper involved cutting individual stencils for each color and shade of color and layering these colors in a given order. The pigment used was water-based oil paint, applied with rubber rollers. Her attention to detail was always impeccable. As Chuck Close remarked about his own incredibly complicated method of using stencils - “there is no work without process.” A Metro North Railroad schedule, dish gloves, Harney’s Tea flavors, landscapes from Italy, Vizsla’s, the opera Madame Butterfly…as I mentioned above, almost anything could inspire her creativity. 

-Dana