Girl with Horse and Heart 1980

I recently sent off over 500 slides to Scancafe, a place that scans your old photographic media and transfers it to a digital file. I had a wonderful time transferring the images onto my hard drive, looking at each image as I decided what folder to put it in. There were pictures of my husband and I in our bad 80's clothes with bad 80's hairdos, but still looking so very young and wrinkle free.  There were pictures of our daughters, tiny beings riding around in baby carriers on our backs, and pictures of friends with (lots of)jet black hair. There were studio shots of all my different studios from the different places we had lived, including one from the Zuni Reservation with a little heifer in the front yard.  And then there were over seven years worth of my images that I had never gotten around to putting onto my computer, almost everything from before 1987.

I loved finding this image, a self portrait.  The photo is off me during a hike into Havisu Canyon in Arizona.  The technique is oil paint over a gelatin silver print (8"x10" since I was still experimenting with this new way of working), and it pleases me to see my creative self beginning to understand all that I could do by marrying  paint and photograph, still completely unexplored ground for me back in 1980. The image has a rich, beautiful quality that only oil paint can give, and an innocence that could only have come from still being so young in my life.