Bio

Denise is a self-taught Canadian artist born in 1973 in Southern Alberta, whose love of drawing was evident to all our family, at an early age.  How do you keep a child who is born to draw from colouring on your walls?  When chastised, Denise merely drew behind the bedroom doors, or on the back closet walls.  When as a pre-teen, she was sent to her room to give it a cleaning, she was found hours later, sketch pad and pencils in hand, sitting on a pile of dirty laundry, oblivious to anything but the muse pushing her forward to create, create, create.  She drew mermaids, dolphins, whales and angels.  I’m sure that on closer inspection of her room, I would have discovered sprinkles of fairy dust.  A strikingly colourful parrot graces a wall in my craftroom-once Denise’s bedroom-and it is too loved to be removed.  In high school-the year she won the Creative Arts Award-she painted a large canvas, of Albert Einstein.  The painting, which was featured in the annual arts festival, was painted for her favourite English teacher and is still on display in that teacher’s classroom, eighteen years later.  She painted animals and whimsical creatures on the backs of her friend’s jean jackets.  And her school binders stood out as HERS covered in doodles the screamed for full expression.  

After graduating, Denise worked at various jobs but the ones she loved most dealt with graphic design.  She was a quick study of anything computer and Corel Draw became her friend.  With one foot in the working world, she fed her soul by dipping into the mysteries of design.  She married and had a son and a daughter.  Her muse had to fight for attention.

As her children became more self-sufficient, she was drawn back to her art.  It had taken a few years but the fairy dust she’d breathed in, in her bedroom so many years ago, had begun to flow through her veins and onto her sketch pads.  Glorious winged creatures, with skin of satin and eyes that saw and knew everything.  Magical beings came to her in her dreams and demanded to be drawn.  She glowed from within, hours slipping away like quicksilver as fairies squeezed themselves free of her coloured pencils and danced with delight across the paper, twisting and turning, then settling to rest in permanent lines that pulsed with beauty.

For too many years she had muffled the urgings of her muse.  Now set free, it danced to the music of her soul and whispered in her ear that this was only the beginning of a beautiful, magical relationship.

Written with love by,

Chris Mikalson

Denise’s mother