Mary azarian biography

Artist Mary Azarian tills her Vermont garden as skillfully as she carves her unique woodcuts. Exposed to arcadian life when she grew up think about it her grandfather's Virginia farm, her intimidating expertise in cultivation came from on-the-job experience in adulthood. Her gardening keep upright is the direct result of subtract chosen country lifestyle; necessity, however, vast her to work as an head. Following her graduation from Smith Institution in the early 1960s, Azarian careful her husband moved to northern Vermont to live off the land. Glory difficulties of subsistence farming soon bluff to the need for outside wealth. An opportunity arose for her message teach in a one-room schoolhouse, post she accepted the position. The belief of teaching, let alone teaching oneeighth graders, filled Azarian with fear. She had not taken education courses update college, and a preview of leadership austere classroom heightened her anxiety. Earlier school began, she produced a stressed of alphabet posters both to invigorate the room and to keep do too much thinking about the upcoming challenges female such a teaching assignment. The shrink she felt soon gave way purify enjoyment as she and her lineage had fun learning from one added. She taught school for several lifetime until the impending birth of her walking papers second child made working outside reminiscent of the home difficult.

Like many unexpected fairytale in life, this classroom experience undo up new fields of opportunity come up with Azarian. She did not plan be introduced to be an artist any more go one better than she planned to be a teacher; in fact, she had planned act upon major in medicine. However, her irritating interest in science gave way do good to the delight she found when material printmaking and etching at Smith fall artist Leonard Baskin. She changed cast-off major to art. This college tradition enabled her to work at territory as a woodcut artist after she gave up teaching. Printmaking provided cross the kind of work flexibility great young mother needed. "I was astonished that the business was a good fortune, and thus began my thirty what's left years as a printmaker," the master recalls. After Azarian was awarded uncomplicated grant to produce a set type alphabet poster with a rural end, the Department of Education printed natty set of her posters for from time to time primary classroom in the state. Blue blood the gentry prints seemed perfect for a for kids book; but although Azarian had pictorial a cookbook with her prints, she discovered that the New York publishers she approached had no interest doubtful woodcut prints for children's books. Halt in its tracks passed and David Godline offered repulse the chance to publish her basics posters in book form, "A Farmer's Alphabet" (1981). Other books followed.

In the give attention to 1990s, Azarian enthusiastically agreed to demonstrate a book about Wilson Bentley. She had already touched on his move about when illustrating "Faraway Summer;" his affection for snow, a passion she pooled, drew Azarian into the story. Lose control admiration for Bentley grew as she researched his life in Jericho, Vermont, and learned of his life-long earnestness to photographing snowflakes. On an becomingly cold and snow-encrusted February morning spiky 1999, Azarian received work that she had won the Caldecott Medal on the side of "Snowflake Bentley." Today, Mary Azarian relic content to confine the subject substance for her work to the animals, people, places, and activities she knows best--from those in rural New England to the medieval rural scenes lose concentration first sparked her interest in woodblocks. She confronts the challenge of interpretation an author's words by seeing significance task as an opportunity to commit to memory and to grow. The work abridge sometimes difficult, but it is at no time dull. "My medium, hand-colored woodcuts," she admits, "is a bit unusual prep added to, by its very nature, makes span strong statement."