About

Can a university-educated person legitimately call herself an “outsider artist?” I”m not a trained artist–the closest I got to training was selling textbooks, t-shirts and art supplies in a college bookstore in the 1980s. And I’m fairly convinced that there’s really nobody out right now doing what I’m doing. My work does not fit into any sort of school or movement or style.

I’d tried a lot of different arts and crafts and my spare bedroom is taken up with the results of purchases I’d made for experimentation, but I tend towards perfectionism. Consequently, projects I would start either took me a very long time to complete or were simply abandoned in frustration because I wanted everything to be Just Right.

However, in the fall of 2009, I learned a way to paint mandalas serendipitously by manipulating paint on Rives BFK printmaking paper. Not every painting worked, but a lot did. Not only that, I liked the results from this style of painting and my urges toward perfectionism were quieted. Then I started showing people my mandalas, uploading them on my Facebook page and, finally, making a holiday card out of one I thought turned out rather well. I was surprised when my coworkers put them up in their offices.

I make my art for me first and if other people like it, that’s great. I can afford to do this since I still have my day job.

CV

Arts (Seriously, little schooling to speak of, and I’m sure it shows)

• Kindergarten Art with Miss O’Brien, Concord, California, 1965-66

Education (Kind of Expected of Me)

• Bachelor of Arts in Government, University of Texas at Austin, 1984
• Juris Doctor, University of Houston Law Center, 1989

Employment (AKA Day Job, Keeps the Lights On and the Cats Fed)

• Technical Root Cause Analyst at Fortune 500 Company–I investigate system failures and make recommendations on how to keep these failures from occurring again.

Residence

• Mesa, Arizona, United States of America

Send me an e-mail:  mirele at gmail dot com