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Robin Brooks Susan Reifman Kirk Coleen Pickard Lauren Sinnott Lara Nolan Cecilia Moen Veronica Stewart Amy Rose

Lauren Sinnott Hello, hello... Greetings to all who read these words glowing on their computer screens. I’m Lauren, the soul of Artgoddess, and the person to whom the “Universal Gift” image was delivered. As with many of my accomplishments, someone asked me to produce. One of the La Leche League chapters in Houston was hosting the meetings where I went to find the mother tribe and socialize with non-plastic families, and they asked me to design a notecard to use for fundraising... The cross-legged Hindu/Hawaiian/Botticelli Renaissance woman and her BIG child came through an intense series of sketches, reworking, tracing and retracing, until I thought I had the perfect, distilled line. (There are a few very small changes I'd make now, but nothing you'd really notice.) So, from humble beginnings, a star is born. She has been ordered by people around the world, has been copied on an art car I had nothing to do with in the famous Houston Art Car Parade, and was clipped from this very Attachments Catalogue and used in a collage by a woman I later met when I moved to California. The “Universal Gift” is also available printed in maroon ink on ivory ORGANIC COTTON T-shirts, which can be ordered through my website, www.artgoddess.com My entry into the art world came early, at least the art world of my own mind. My mother, Audrey, was an artist, illustrator and designer who refused to let my sisters and I use coloring books. When I was four, I drew the woman you see here, with her tiered skirt, tiny waist, bodice, cape and flower crown. I taped the paper together in a cylinder so she, with her imposing gesture, could stand. About twenty years later, after studying Art History and broadening my cultural and spiritual horizons into the realms of anthropology, Goddess worship and feminism, I remembered her and and realized with increasing astonishment who she was: the Minoan Snake Goddess from ancient Crete. The Queen's chambers in the palace at Knossos on the Island of Crete had running water 3,500 years ago and dolphins were painted all around the upper walls. For as long as I can remember, dolphins and wolves have been the inner companions of my heart. The combination of warm and cold places, wide open land and wide open sea, have guided my life. I grew up with snow and ice in Wisconsin, but also loved the hot nights and solid humidity of the Gulf Coast, where I went to university. In High School, I was drawn blindly to Oceanography, having zero experience, but an acceptance at MIT on the East Coast. However, Rice University lured our educated, low-income family with its full scholarship and magnificent financial aid. I knew as much about Houston as I did the ocean, but soon found out it was built on a swamp and was full of trees (and sometimes cockroaches, which I had never seen before). My Dad was entranced by the genteel habit of referring to even the two-inch tree roaches as palmetto bugs. As if the innocent word "bug" could describe a boundless population of scary insects, which at 10PM will rise up together, erratically bombing through the room and deliberately flying at humans. Before coming to Rice, I lived a year in Belgium as an exchange student, which was a crucial enriching experience, and made me learn French the only easy way, by necessity. Therefore, it was the path of least resistance to earn my undergraduate degrees in art and French. I was so entrenched, hanging out with friends, that I stayed on until I had a BFA in painting and an MA in Art History. I really had no idea where I was going with my life, but I did have a great capacity for inciting joy in myself and others. Now I can see that most of what I studied and did outside the class room really did prepare me for the artist, instigator of fun, and politician I have become. I became the mother of two cherished boys with exactly the same lack of planning that that characterized my university years, but they have since formed me as much as I formed them. Not only do conception, pregnancy and birth MAKE you a mother, but then the period of breastfeeding CREATES from the raw clay of the unknowing woman, a nurturing, psychically-connected, fierce and tender mother who will never again know what it means to be entirely selfish. After twenty-three years in Houston, I was ready to roll. I had begun my mural painting career, as you see in this detail of a Baroque Bathroom, located in an endocrinologist's suburban home. This took as long to paint as Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in Rome (four years), and spanned the toddlerhood of my oldest child. Life was not too easy and it seemed that a better place for me beckoned. Naturally, it would lie to the west, toward less tamed land and the big water. I bought a 1977 International Harvestor school bus that had been rustically converted into a rolling home by a park ranger in Alaska. The boys and I drove out on those crowded Houston highways one more time. But this time was deeply satisfying, because we were truly on the road. The story of our search for the best place to live is told in the form of a tundra love story, on my website. The place we found (that found me) was one of the smallest incorporated towns in the country, as far out to sea as you can get, heading towards Hawaii, without being IN the water. I am a City Council member and last October I increased my monthly expenditure on housing by a factor of sixteen when the boys and I moved from the bus and bought our first house. The tundra part of this love story comes from my trips up north to the wild lands of Canada's Northwest Territories. I fell irrevocably in love with the Thelon River barrens and painted two murals depicting it, the most recent one, last month. It is pictured here, on the day of its installation, in Yellowknife. It was my revelation, during this last departure, that these spiritual visions of land and creatures painted on a grand scale, in a public venue, are what I need to be doing. An inspired artist is a happy artist (and better parent) and a grateful politician is a good politician. So look for more of these, which will be available to the public as signed prints (this one without the telephone pole!) Thanks, and blessings to you! Lauren Sinnott Artgoddess P. O. Box 921 Point Arena, CA 95468 (707) 882-3100 www.artgoddess.com © 1997-2006 Lori Thompson Photography