Featured Artist ~ Letha Colleen

Her Shop ~ Pursuit of Happiness Her Blog ~ Pursuit of Happiness

"I’ve been making stuff with paper since I was a child. Paper dolls, scrapbooks, decoupage… I love cutting things up into a heap of shapes and strips and pieces --- a testament to my destructive streak. Even more fun is the reassembly: I like to hunt through the piles surrounding me at my art table, looking for just the right piece, color or texture to form the memory or daydream that is the piece I am working on --- a testament to my healing streak.

As an adult making art, I am doing what many of us strive to do --- capture the essence of childhood memory and experiences so that I can look at it in comparison to where I am in the current timeline of my life. Many of my pieces feel like pages lifted from a particular experience I had as a child... somewhere around the age of 8 or 9. Being a rabid climber of trees --- often very high trees --- I have a huge mental storehouse of topographical images of backyards, the Puget Sound, the Narrows Bridge and a variety of nearby islands all mixed up and tied to my musings on what I was learning and seeing at the time. This is primarily what you’ll see in my art work: landscapes slightly fractured and segmented by personal mental pathways and their corresponding struggles and/or epiphanies.

In terms of medium I make my art out of new and vintage papers, rusty metal strips, keys, old hardware, watch parts and gears and all manner of random found objects.

I went to art school; I learned color theory, composition, life drawing… my BFA is in Interior Design so in many ways I am also a self taught artist.

I hope to continue to make art, in one form or another, for the rest of my life."