About the Art
From ancient Egypt to Scythia, Babylon to Ireland, forgotten styles have always moved me. The powerful images of gods and animals stir me, and working in these lost forms connects me with a primal symbolic vocabulary. Our modern art may have forgotten this ancient language, but our hearts have not.
From the ornate yet deceptively simple art of the Egyptians to the wild convolutions and colors of the Irish manuscripts, ancient cultures have provided me with illumination. By learning from them I've cultivated a richness of detail and a willingness to approach form as fluid, as part of a pattern.
The comparatively modern has offered me much as well. Art Nouveau pioneers Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley were my first inspirations, and from them I took a love of flowing line, of organic shapes and fluid, sensual curves.
Tribal tattoo art has a harsher, more jagged appeal, and that, too, finds its way into my work with its its dynamic use of motion and line, its balance tempered with asymmetry, its grace studded with thorns.
I enjoy working in many styles, and in doing so I have found a style that is all my own, an ever-smoother, ever-evolving fusion of my inspirations. Whether I am faithfully reproducing a design from an ancient standing stone, or creating something new, my art comes from a place part primitive, part modern, where anything is possible. It's a place that exists inside of all of us, which is why I believe my art speaks to a wide range of people.
I painted my first box in 1998 as a Mother's Day gift. While I've done many kinds of work, from greeeting cards to tee shirts, from paintings on cloth canvas to the warmer canvas of human skin, I really adore boxes. Part of it is undoubtedly the human urge to neaten, to create order from chaos, to hold and protect, but there's more to it than that.
Boxes, to me, represent hope.
Emptiness is just emptiness, a hole. But a box is emptiness waiting to be filled with something precious.
It's my hope that in the commissioned work I do, I create a worthy vessel for hope, for memories, for love, for sheer joy. Expressing my clients' ideas with my art gives me great pleasure. Each box is created for a different purpose, and so each is truly unique. I put all of my creative force into each one so that everything from pattern to color expresses the theme they have selected.
It is a touching line of work, and a humbling one.
About the Writing
John Gardner once said "No motive is too low for art."
I'm here to have fun. I realize that in a time where even the American action movie takes itself too seriously, it's often regarded as heretical to claim that one's work is meant to be entertaining. Nevertheless, I seek to entertain.
I write because I am human.
I write erotica because it is, to me, the most human genre of fiction, and the most intimate.
I write sci-fi and fantasy because I feel that speculative fiction offers a unique insight into our condition as humans. Science fiction uses technology as the vehicle by which an author explores what it means to be human. Fantasy is all about power; people who come by it at great cost, and people who lose it.
And I write humor because I think that next to sex, laughter is the best thing you can give to someone else, or to yourself.
About the Artist
So now you want to know about me?
I'm one weird gal. I write and paint, mostly, but I can also dance when I'm not busy limping like a pirate. Despite the tattoo and red streaks in the hair, I'm generally harmless-looking, and I compensate by swearing a lot. You'd probably better get used to it now.
I keep snakes as pets and am kept by cats. Books are my friends. I have little use for people who can't see the value in books, snakes, and cats.
I have a husband, too. I call him Sargon the Terrible, but his real name is Paul. We've been married for twelve years, and known each other half our lives. Between us we listen to lots of contradictory music and watch lots of cartoons and bad movies.
I can drive a stick and start a fire, so I'm not entirely impractical. My knowledge of myths and fairy tales has yet to help me get Timmy out of a well, though, so I may be talking out of my ass on that one.
My nom de guerre is Naamah. It was my dance name, and has become my second name on the intarweb.
Naamah was a title of Astarte, and later, a Hebrew demoness. As a demoness, she was known for strangling babies and luring men away from their spouses.
Well, I thought it was appropriate.
I live in Oklahoma, which is not as bad as it sounds. Honest.
And just so you know, despite living in Oklahoma, I am pro-choice, pro-birth-control, and pro-gay-marriage. I'm also childfree. The rest is open to debate, but those are the big four that aren't.
I am what I am, and I know no other way to be.
-- Angela Carter, "Wolf-Alice"
