I have been a professional artist all of my life. I started by trading artwork in kindergarten...that's when I found out that trading is much more fun than selling. I shared art projects with both of my artistic parents and two exceptional grandmothers who all taught me to really look at the world and experiment. Memphis Academy of Art classes were my favorite Saturday activities, so after graduation from Hutchison, art school was a natural. I wanted to just study art but my wise parents edged me toward a broader education and the Southern Methodist University art department seemed a great place for me... my parents wanted me to be in religious environment...little did they know...

My commercial art experience at SMU turned abruptly to illustration in my senior year. I was so inspired by a recruiting Hallmark illustrator that I put on a very short lime green linen suit, grabbed my portfolio and flew up to Kansas City for a day for an interview. My parents and I were truly shocked when I got a job!

Eight years with Jan Manco, Gail Flores, and all of the other fabulous artists at Hallmark left me confident and prepared to go freelance when I married Peter Casparian and moved to Denton, Texas to teach art at Selwyn School. That was hard work! We lasted a year and moved to Dallas where Peter was Episcopal chaplain at St. Mark's School and I began freelancing in earnest designing gift wrap for Neiman Marcus and greeting cards for anyone who would buy them...and I also got pregnant. When Peter got the opportunity to be chaplain at Kansas University it was hard to pass up...even though we were having a baby that summer.

Rachel was born in Memphis as we waited at my parents' house for our home in Lawrence, KS to be ready for us. Freelance was easy there. We were surrounded by helpful students and friends so I began a side business of making hand sewn vestments for Episcopal clergy. That business spun way out of control for me when I had 3 people sewing with me and a year's worth of backlog...so we finished it off and I turned back to commercial art. Then, Hannah was born into this busy household and I began to play more and work less. 

Because we had summers off we began a life of travel in Central and South America...Costa Rica (6 months of language school), Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile...all which, of course, filled my eyes with inspiration.

After 9 years in Lawrence, we moved to Lexington, KY for Peter to be rector at St. Michael's Church...a wonderful place full of supportive friends for all of us. I began working with ad agencies and coaxed my friend and piano teacher Beth Eckert to be my art rep...I had found out in Lawrence that I'm not a very good business person. Beth and I were GREAT together.

When my dear friend George Ella Lyon asked me if I wanted to submit drawings for a book she was working on I was flabbergasted.  Children's book illustration is very specialized and I knew nothing of editors. Late at night in my basement studio I worked up lots of drawings of dogs and sent them to Orchard Press. Dick Jackson encouraged me to do some more and low and behold, he called and said he thought we had something to work with. I was stunned and excited. It was a year's worth of work and revisions... and SO much fun. I learned from George Ella about positioning page turns and how to carry her story on into pictures. The months after the publishing of ADA'S PAL were also fun because we got to go on tour together reading and talking to kids in libraries and schools. Now you can buy Ada's Pal on Amazon for 1 penny! Not so encouraging.

It was hard to leave this new world of publishing behind but St. James Church in Florence, Italy beckoned our family...well, maybe not 7th grade Hannah... but Rachel and Peter and I were ecstatic.

Our 10 years in Florence were, of course, magical. The girls graduated from the American School and went back to the U.S. for college...Rachel to Antioch College and Hannah to The Culinary Institute of America. Peter and I ate too much pasta, drank too much wine and made long lasting friends, and while he worked I found real inspiration and encouragement. I was painting out in the Tuscan hills one day and noticed a work truck going back and forth. At lunch time the truck pulled up next to me and the driver hopped out with some drawings...he wanted my critique! Everybody in Italy is a painter...or an opera singer. I was painting daily in oil and pastels and some watercolor and found a market in many of the visitors who passed though our house and the church.

Leaving Florence was hard, but we REALLY missed our girls. We settled in Oyster Bay, NY at Christ Church in their gorgeous historic rectory. We were only an hour on the train from Rachel who is an actor in New York and and a 2 hour drive from Hannah at the CIA up the Hudson River. Our home became a weekend haven for young people who needed a breather from the city. Hannah moved in with us and got a registered dietitian degree from Post, and we ran into the city to see Rachel on stage. Peter and I formed lifelong bonds with the "kids" who filled the beds in that house we called "Mixed Breeds in Need" and I kept on painting and selling out of a gallery in Oyster Bay. Carol DeForest changed my painting trajectory when she invited me to an encaustic workshop at R&F Paints. I'm still mesmerized by melting and hardening wax.

Peter began to dream of retirement and returning to Italy more often as well as traveling to all of the other places we'd loved and the ones we hadn't seen.

So here we are in San Marcos, TX... 30 miles down Interstate 35 from Hannah in Austin where she's a chef and working on opening a bakery. We bought a house in this funky college town and have re-modeled and made it our gallery/home. Peter pretends to be retired but we keep spending a month in New York in the summer at different churches and catching up on what Rachel's doing and he can't resist calls for help from churches in Austin. I have a large beautiful studio and am happily working mostly in encaustic wax. We are close to museums in Austin and San Antonio for lots of inspiration and have fabulous neighbors, Jean and Jene Laman, for critique whenever I need it. Travel is a lure but I love my studio!