Barb Moore lives with her husband David, a sheltie and 5 cats in their tiny 1920s storybook cottage. She studied fine arts at Texas Woman's University and Collin County Community College, majoring in graphic design and photography.
My father was a printer. When I was growing up, we had an abundant supply of paper. My dad would bring home leftovers from his jobs; strips of all weights and colors, a variety of 8.5"x11" sheets and occasionally a huge sheet that was unsuitable for the press. With this bounteous treasure, some scissors, paste and a few crayons, my brothers and I became artists and inventors extraordinaire, creating not only sketches and drawings but fashioning strange and mysterious characters and their appurtenances in three dimensions. Our imaginations stretched beyond our mundane suburban existence and whisked us away to far off lands, allowed us to interact with history or created for us entire worlds that no human had heretofore envisioned.
Years later, I couldn't draw a stick figure if my life depended on it! How does that happen?!
When my son started high school in 1993, I decided it was time to go back to work. I went to the publishing company and applied for my old job. They asked, "Do you know Mac?" I said "Mac who?" Hmmmm. I went back to school to learn to use Quark XPress, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator on the Macintosh. One of the courses that was required for a graphic arts degree was drawing. I dreaded taking that class. I put it off until the very last. I know the poor instructor thought I was retarded in some way. Then one day the magic happened. I stepped back from my easel and it seemed that the Drawing Elf had been there. It just clicked. This opened up a whole new world for me. I extended my studies into the fine arts; photography, drawing, watercolor, color theory, painting, mosaics and digital art, which was still fairly new at that time.
Today I do very little digital artwork. I enjoy painting portraits of people and their pets and an occasional still life. My true love, though, is mosaics. Fashioning something unique and beautiful from discarded items, broken glass, eggshell gives me a tingle of satisfaction. Still, there are times I'd like to go back to my first love--paper. How marvelous it would be to rekindle that childish abandon and discover once again the joy of true creation.
Perhaps, like Mary Delany, who began her greatest works at age 72, I will eventually find my niche.
