Some say that if there ever was a time when elves and men walked the earth together, it was long, long ago. History has passed into legend and legend into myth, and few remember at all. And yet...relics remain in our hearts and minds, in our stories and songs and sagas. I love to explore this world beyond imagination in paintings and mixed media assemblages, combining my own pen and ink drawings, images from antique books, ephemera gleaned from the forest floor...I love texture, which I use richly and abundantly, affixing leaves or shells or sand to archival surfaces, then glazing and antiqueing. Old maps reappear as background elements, bits of text from old books find new life. This one has the wild face of a woman of Faerie among the other artifacts...the finished piece is antiqued and distressed so it might almost be a relic of these past legengs. Some pieces are embellished with clay plaques, themselves deeply textured with cryptic images, often Celtic in origin. I have amassed an extensive collection of natural texturing tools like leaves and shells, as well as stamps collected over many years, some new, some imported, some antique, some hand made by the artist.