Liz: You know Linnea after looking at this article I think that you are the artist that we all know but didn’t realize that we knew.   I think we’ve all seen your art work on something, you’re art is everywhere, I’ve seen it on calendars, I’ve seen it on cards, I’ve seen it on websites, how long have you been around and doing your art?

Linnea: Well I started the calendar business in 1986 that was the 1987 calendar that I was working on the year before, and up until that you most likely wouldn’t have seen my work as it was pretty locally involved in the place where I worked which was in Aspen Colorado but I didn’t really start doing public outside art until I began the poster calendar project in 1986.

Liz: Well I understand that you came to it through a sort of a convoluted maze you started off in college pursuing a degree in art and then you thought, ‘Oh maybe this is not going to pay the bills’.   And it side tracked

Linnea: Well that true, I think it’s always a little chancy and every once in a while you get the feeling a little more like you should make what you think is a responsible decision and I thought that advertising and journalism would probably pay the bills a little better. As it turns out I’ve used all the things I learned there along with the art in the final analysis so I guess it all worked out but that’s not exactly how I started thinking that I was going to be a painter of some sort but then I lost my nerve mid way through and went into the more business side of things.

Liz: I think you suffer the same fate as many artists, it’s one of those things that you do what you love and you love what you’re doing, but you’re just so worried that it’s not going to pay the bills.

Linnea: Well that’s right but there nothing like necessity to focus ones talent no matter how meager and determination you still need the money or you need or have a real goal.
It really does focus on things, it doesn’t really matter you just go for it and as I looked ahead at my children’s educational ambitions as well as the cost of colleges and post college studies which kind of made me glazed over a bit and then I thought well if there’s ever a ‘it’s time to make this kind of work lets go for it’ and what do you know it worked out and we have been lucky and through to the calendars I’ve had gained some exposure with that, with calendars and cards and then I had a sort of an invitation from book publishers and I’ve worked on children’s books, first for Simon and Schuster and then for Scholastic Publishing in New York and I’ve enjoyed those things too.  And I probably wouldn’t have gone that route if I hadn’t done the calendars, where people have seen my work out and about.

Liz: Well I had to laugh because you’re obviously a very creative, a very artistic person who likes to express herself and some of the work you did early on to pay those bills was as an illustrator doing furniture ads for Montgomery Ward and I really can’t think of any that would less allow you to show your creativity than something like that.

Linnea: Well you know I tell you that I went to the University of Illinois and that is where I got my degree and education in journalism after I had started out in art but then switched over and if you wanted a good graduate school, if you want to call it that, graduate school or graduate education after you did the advertising learning you went to the city of Chicago where the headquarters for Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward existed and you got, if you didn’t get a job there you went to an advertising agency that there were real large advertising  departments in both of those large catalog houses.  Sears and Montgomery Ward and they provide the starting jobs and education for any number of people who were known to making some rather grand jobs in advertising in the city of Chicago and other places too, but we saw a lot of your fellow school when you’re working for one of the large catalog company.

Liz: You’re being very nice and very diplomatic it was great just to have a job wasn’t it.

Linnea: Oh it was, and of course there was an expected responsibility at that time, you got your education and you ran out and you earned a living and you made the best of it.

Liz: Where do you find your inspiration?  I’m looking at this great cat who’s wrapped in a red and green muffler as part of your Christmas series and I pretty much guarantee that if you have a cat at home he’s probably not going to be standing there wrapped in a muffler.  So where do you get your visions?

Linnea: Well cats just by there nature seem to be the animal we indulge the most and they seem to have a mind of their own and a little creativity of their own I guess.  But a funny story about that card you’ve just mentioned just to show that life does not always move in a straight line, from point A to point B that it is more like a series of concentric circles that overlap one another.   I got a Christmas card, that very card, with the scarf wrapped around a cat’s neck in the mail to me two Christmases ago from a college friend, my old friend Sylvia Johnson, and she hadn’t seem me since college and she sent me the card all these decades later and in the card was a picture of herself and her husband holding their own black cat wearing a red and green scarf that was knitted by her to emulate the one on the Christmas card and wrapped around her cat as best they could to show the same pose as the cat on the card had.  She wrote back she said, ‘We saw these cards’ she wrote on the back of the card, ‘we saw these cards in a local store they got them and we loved them so much and saw that it was you’.  So we reconnected after all these decades, based on that silly cat with his green and red scarf, I just laugh to think that their poor cat put up with them to pose for the Christmas picture.

Liz: That cat had blood in its eyes I can guarantee it.

Linnea: Well you know it did have a certain intensity in its look that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. 

Liz: I’m quite sure though over the years there’s been one something that you’ve done that is your favorite, and if you had to name it what would it be?

Linnea: Ooh, well, I’ve rather liked doing vegetables.

Liz: Ahh.

Linnea: And there’s kind of an ornamental but monumental kind of a quality to them and I guess if I had to choose my favorite of anything it would be a rather large artichoke I think it may even be in one of the pictures in the magazine. I believe it may be, it’s on the wall right up behind the group of salmon that was last years July or this year July, this last July.  I like both the salmon from this year and the artichoke from several years ago but I often do vegetables but I do them big because they are so fabulous I just love to look at the structure of an artichoke or the way berries grow on a branch or after the blossoms have fallen off and the berries kind of expose themselves and get hard and colorful.   I just love the mathematics of it and the way they’re numbered in groups, the way they swirl around I love the nature forms that’s my thing.

Liz: Linnea do you have any special plans for the holidays in term of how you’re going to decorate or anything unusual you that you may do to celebrate the holidays? 

Linnea: Well this year I won’t be doing the usual thing which is a Scandinavian Christmas with the little flags and flags of garland all around the railings and hand carved ornaments, and all that sort of thing because I’m going to spend Christmas with my grandchildren and let them do all the decorating that I’m going to come armed with some Scandinavian decorations to help them out but that’s our tradition is to have a more Scandinavian Christmas.  Baking little heart shaped cookies out of gingerbread and hanging them in the window on a piece of red ribbon and trying to have a little more back to nature kind of look to the tree, that sort of thing.

Liz: Well one thing you can be guaranteed of, it will be a lot of fun and it will be very eclectic it the grandkids are doing it.

Linnea: That’s right.

Liz: A little bit of everything but it will be a wonderful memory.

Linnea: Yes.

Liz: Linnea thank you so much this has been a lovely discussion and I do appreciate your time and you are so talented.

Linnea: well thank you, I’ve been looking forward to talking with you and it’s been fun talking to you.

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