Denise Sutherland

Denise Sutherland was born in Melbourne, Australia, and has lived for most of her life in Canberra. She has lived for some time in the USA, including New Haven CT, Tucson AZ, and Boulder CO. She is married to the lovely astrophysicist Dr Ralph; they have 2 teenagers and 1 chihuahua.

Denise has a background in Science, and a degree in Graphic Design. She loves creating recycled art - partially because it's environmentally friendly, but mainly because of the inherent fascination in turning something discarded into a work of art. In her collages she incorporates texture and impressionistic 'strokes of paper' to achieve an effect that is surprisingly realistic and often mistaken for painting.

The "Butterfly Books" collage is made entirely with paper - no drawing or painting has been done on the artwork. The paper is mostly from high-quality glossy magazines, supplemented with small pieces of Japanese paper for fibrous textures, and some painted tissue paper. The pieces of paper are sorted by colour, torn or cut into shape, and applied like 'movable brush strokes'. The glue is artist-quality matt acrylic medium. Each piece of paper is applied individually with a stiff short-bristled brush, and completely coated with acrylic medium, which protects it from fading or breaking down, and rolled down with a brayer. (Our bookplate is a reproduction of the collage on our high quality label paper.)

Denise first read about BookCrossing in a magazine she wrote crosswords for in 2003, but didn't do anything about it then. A year later, having forgotten everything except the basic idea of leaving books in the wild, she hit Google, and finally found the BookCrossing web site! She's now a confirmed BookCrossing addict, runs the Canberra BC Forum, and can frequently been seen 'paying bail' on books in op-shops, to read, register and release. When she's not creating collages or painting watercolours, Denise writes and publishes themed puzzle books, and is a syndicated crossword compiler. She is also an obsessed knitter, and has recently launched her Knitting Art series of watercolours, which can be found on CafePress.

Visit her online gallery at http://sutherland-studios.com.au.

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