Barbara Barrick McKie - My work tends to be grouped in several themes: nature, particularly floral and birds with landscapes, but also other animals including people, often with a whimsical element, and abstraction with surface design elements are often included. I combine all types of fabric manipulation: painting with dyes on fabric, and disperse dye computer transfers, shibori, immersion died fabric, and more recently thread painting. I often include trapunto in my work. Almost all of my work is for sale, and I have many more pieces on my website www.mckieart.com I also do commissions. All of my work consists of white fabric that I have manipulated in some way to create the design, and most works contain computer imagery from my garden or from my travels based on my own photography printed on polyester fabric. I like to combine realism with abstraction in many of my pieces. I will be a featured artist in two books premiering in 2012. One will have one of my quilts on the cover making a total of 8 quilts, and the other will include 6 of my pieces. In this way, I am consolidating my whole life: pharmaceutical research, life-long interest in nature and in photography inspired from our travels and the flowers I grow, art quilting for the wall, from 1971 to 1978, and my career as a personal computer consultant from 1982 to 1991, returning to quilting in. This makes my work unique in my field of art quilts.