THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 27, 1994 TAG: 9408260065
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E01 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CRAIG A. SHAPIRO, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
WHEN SHE was a girl in upstate New York, Dana Simson did a lot of the things kids do: She played dress-up, or maybe starred in make-believe movies.
``But my favorite thing when I was little was making pretend environments,'' she said. Simson, her brother and sister would take a story - ``Robinson Crusoe'' was usually first choice - and re-create the whole schmear.
The Eastern Shore artist is still making pretend environments.
Her large, fanciful ceramics and free-standing toy crankboxes are worlds of their own, separate and whole.
``Man's Best Friend'' features a man in a suit and bowler hat walking his dog as if he's holding a briefcase. In the side of Fido's body is a clock.
Turn the handle and a man and woman - cups and saucers where their heads should be - leap ritually but uncertainly in ``Time for Tea.''
Another couple try to maintain a balance as their lives literally fly by. It's Simson's ``Tempest in a Teapot.''
Even her new project, the soon-to-be-published children's book ``Moon Goes Fishing,'' is drawn from a kind of pretend environment.
Frenchtown, where Simson lives with her husband and daughter, is a little artists' community - 11 houses total - on the Maryland part of the Chesapeake Bay. It's up the road from Upper Fairmount, where she has a studio, Chesapeake East. Neither is in the road atlas.
Simson is promoting the book with a show at Norfolk's new Artifax gallery. And while ``Moon'' is pure whimsy, its genesis wasn't. After suffering a miscarriage, she ``had to detox.''
``My creativity comes out in a lot of different ways,'' said Simson, who until recently sang in a rock/swing band and penned a Sunday comic for The Baltimore Sun. ``I live on the water and have always liked the moon. `Moon goes fishing.' It's a magical phrase. The idea is that all souls are up there. It's a complex theory (but) it helped me work out that painful experience.''
Likewise, her work, which has been shown in galleries along the East Coast, in the National Aquarium in Baltimore and at Virginia Beach's Boardwalk Art Show, relates to a bigger whole.
``It's about time and space,'' Simson said. ``The sky where I live is so vast you can see it passing by. You can almost see time passing by. People, myself included, get wound up in what we're doing. And it's getting worse. We're conscious of the time factor; we need to be at peace with time.
``The sky for me is like nature's clock.''
Simson is working with teachers around the country soliciting feedback for a new venture called ``You Can Walk on the Water, You Can Walk on the Sky,'' a workbook of sorts with exercises to stimulate children's imaginations.
``We're in videoland being spoon-fed our images,'' she said. ``Like anything, our imagination will atrophy if we don't use it.''
It's like the ``button gardens'' Simson's grandmother used to make her back in New York. On the surface of a big button, she'd create whole worlds - one had a couple of boys flying kites - then put them under a glass.
Presto. Pretend environments.
``I'm an illustrator,'' Simson said. ``If you distill me down to powder and put me in a bottle, it would be in one with `Illustrator' on the label. I like to think people's minds are working when they see my stuff.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff color photo by RICHARD L. DUNSTON
Dana Simson, an artist from Maryland's Eastern Shore, with one of
her pieces on display at Artifax Gallery in Norfolk.
EXHIBIT FACTS
What: Works by Eastern Shore artist Dana Simson
Where: Artifax, 1511 Colley Ave., Norfolk
When: Through Sept. 10
Hours: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday; noon to 5 p.m.
Sunday
Call: 623-8840
KEYWORDS: PROFILE
by CNB