This current series of work is painted on illustrations from an 1850s woman’s magazine. I enjoy the challenge of working on the found surfaces, and endeavor to make the incongruous new imagery of mine fit seamlessly on the Victorian era fashion plates. Painting on these images gives a delicious feeling of wickedness that can come from defiling something old and perhaps irreplaceable, the feeling of a child drawing on a wall. This is echoed in the imagery I choose. The proper Victorian visuals contrast with my rebellious side and lead me to conceptual choices. The intense detail in the fashions also made me look to spiders and insects, which share that beautiful intricate detail. There are references to Greek and Native American mythology and the metaphor of a spider as seamstress. These paintings are a mixture of absurdity and darkness, as if Emily Dickinson’s poems collided with nature, with an added edge of B movie horror. The use of both found and vintage imagery also informs my other bodies of work.