One night, up at about 2 am to feed Thing One, I thought I’d try to work on a portrait commission I’d started before she was born. Holding her at the breast on one side, I picked up a pencil in my free hand and went to work. It was a bit complicated at first, with lots of shifting around and I thought “I must be MAD.” I figured things out though, and Mad Mother Designs was born alongside Thing One’s first few weeks of life; the rest, as they say, is history.

Today I maintain an art studio in a converted mobile army shelter (yes, it’s totally awesome) in my back yard in Arnprior, Ontario. When I’m back in the main house, I’m renovating (fancy word for fixing) – or just yelling at all those crooked walls. 

Kept going by a healthy sense of humour and an inability to quit, I continue to draw and draw and draw – I’m happiest with a pencil in my hand (second only to a decent watercolour brush) and pursue commissioned graphite portraits and watercolour house portraits. I am intensely focused while drawing; the rest of the world slips away, and everything seems right – no easy task these days.