Emotion is my specialty as an artist. I teach children how to display emotion in their characters because it is often neglected. Children will have a single character that they draw with a neutral, aggressive, happy expression over and over and over and if you vary that emotion you create empathy. Your reader or your viewer suddenly becomes intrigued by what’s going on, so I emphasize that in my art. I have books and books on human expressions and the hundreds of muscles involved and the evolution of recognizing expressions instantly so that you know if the person you meet around the corner on that path on the cliff is aggressive or friendly or even someone that you should be hanging out with.
So yes, the emotions are very important. I tend to exaggerate them slightly. I have a little bit of the cartoonist but I like to mix that in with the oil painting and the sort of classical approach and create empathy in my people and the emotion is the key.
For me the emotion is very important too. I’m one of these people who has what’s called a global memory. My first memories were in the Ringling Brothers circus where my parents — my parents were going to art school and so they lived in a little trailer in Sarasota, Florida and so I guess that’s why I remember my entire childhood. It was very exciting. I mean in the winter you had aerialists that were — a tight wire — tight wire?
High wire.
High wire artists that were performing without anything below them. They had no safety whatsoever because they weren’t on tour, right? And then, you know, I was taking care of by little people and the largest woman in the world was my babysitter so it was just that all these people were very good friends of ours and I have this memory that goes back for every single age that, you know, that I can go back, I can remember, so therefore, I feel what it’s like to be a child.