Teri Sloat

North / Central

Hi! I'm Teri Sloat. I am happy to be a member of the Adolescently Artistic (AA) group of people who have not left their childhood and always have something to say. Thank goodness for words and pictures and the people who buy them….since I choose to spend my time immersed in creating other worlds. Sometimes I wander through one of those other worlds for a long time in a picture book, and sometimes I take a shorter trip while creating a single piece of art that tells a story in one image. I write for the joy of letting the write words roll off my tongue, and you can find me once or twice a week, (or three times if the weather is good), standing somewhere in Sonoma County with my easel painting what I think I see.

My husband, Bob, keeps me in the real world, along with our three grown-up? children, We all enjoy the arts and have just had our third Sloat Family Art show. Bob and I actually illustrated two books together before he found out that contracting was easier for him than working on my stories. Besides, he's got his own to tell.

It's easy to mix up my real world with the fantasy of what I find there. We live on a small farm in Sebastopol, California and have raised our own beef, sheep, chickens, etc…hence the Farmer Brown stories, and we have a cabin in the Trinity Mountains. We lived in the Alaskan bush for 12 years, joined the Yup'ik people in their seasonal activities, and were immersed in their folklore. It is there that I learned how to write a story with pictures on the spot while storyknifing. It is also there that I learned the best way to speak of conflict was through a story.

My imagination also fools me into thinking I'm not scared when I'm riding on a horse through the Rockies on a cliff, or flying into a white-out on the tundra, and my curiousity keeps me traveling to other countries to some out-of-the-way places where mythical animals, imaginary people and their legends still run free.

By the way, I don't intend to grow up. I'm finding that the pictures I've been doing lately are moving me back to color, shape and the same fantasy world I had when I was about 6. Someday I will leave the AA group and move to the PC (Permanently Childish) group.

For more information, please visit www.terisloat.com