Why Are You Here?

I have gotten that question a lot since coming to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Why would a fifty-something woman, with college-age children of her own, decide to enroll in college for the first time? The short answer is that I wrote a book about genetics, and it changed the course of my life. 

I am not a geneticist. I am, by profession, a sculptor and colorist in the equine collectibles industry. I make hyper-realistic, small-scale figurines of horses like the one to the right.

So why did an artist write about horse color genetics?

I became interested in the subject because I wanted to make the horses I created as realistic as possible. From there my interest grew until I was spending almost as much time researching horse colors and patterns as I was painting them. In 1992, I began publishing articles with the hope of helping other artists accurately portray colors and patterns.  Not long after, I began to get requests for articles from the horse community.  In 2001, I was asked to give a presentation in Lexington, Kentucky, alongside Dr. Phillip Sponenberg, whose 1983 book Horse Color had sparked my initial interest in the subject all those years ago.  That experience convinced me that while my background might be unconventional, it offered its own perspective on the visible expression of coat color genes. I still believe that artists bring a unique set of skills and insights that complement those of the scientists working in this field.

In 2009, I began work on what was intended to be a small guidebook for artists covering the colors found in the different breeds. The project grew in scope, and the first volume of The Equine Tapestry was published in the summer of 2012. A second book followed two years later. The series and its companion blog were enormously popular. Soon I was spending more and more time away from my studio and I was increasingly identified, not as an artist or even as a writer, but as a “geneticist”.  

The problem with this was that not only did not have any formal education in the science of genetics – I had no formal education at all! The first time I stepped inside a college classroom was as a guest lecturer; I had never taken a science class beyond high school Biology. Everything I knew came from curiosity about a topic I loved and a belief that I could understand anything I put my mind to learning. I still believe that is true, and that we do the cause of scientific literacy a disservice when we behave as if the subject is only accessible to those with a formal education. But I could not help but wish that things had turned out differently. How much more could I have learned in a formal classroom, with others to help guide my inquiries? What doors might open if I could legitimately say I was a geneticist?

In the spring of 2018, I decided that while I could not change the fact that I did not attend college when I was young, the only thing stopping me from attending now was the belief that it was too late. I tracked down my 30-year-old high school transcripts and before I knew it I was writing papers in APA format and trying to master college Algebra. I am not yet a geneticist – and may never yet be one – but the idea that I could be has sent me on a most marvelous adventure so far!