Patty Christiena Willis, at the Comptoir Libanais for a feast.

Some of my earliest memories, from before I was two, are of sitting in the back seat of our family car, a book on my lap and my imagination deep into the illustrations. Each image opened a world of possibility. When I learned to read, my favorite book, The Birds of North America, was a disappointment.  In elementary school, I illustrated my stories of kings and queens and fairies with drawings.  My painting took a twenty year hiatus until I was introduced to brushes and ink in a calligraphy class my third year in Japan.  I soon discovered that when I was out of ideas for the next scene of a play or chapter of a story, all I had to do was get out my brushes and ink stone and a blank sheet of paper.  Soon, my brush moved into Chinese characters, that had become pictures after I studied their historical meaning, or simple paintings.  In 1995, when a play that I had written was published bilingually in Japanese and English, rediscovered my illustrations and the publisher wanted to add them to the book.  Since then, painting has become a spiritual practice, a place I return when I wonder where my writing is going or to illustrate a dream.  I take out a piece of thick paper, my stick of fragrant sumi, my ink stone, brushes, and my Japanese and French gouache, and paint what I see in my mind.

Almost two years ago, my studio became an adobe casita in the Sonoran Desert landscape of Tucson. In that place, my ancestors emerged. This painting "My dream the night he left for Waterloo" is of my great great grandmother's grandmother, Margaret Cowan, living in County Down in the northern part of Ireland. Soon after their marriage, her husband left to fight in the Napoleonic Wars. Alone and pregnant, she dreamed one night of a butterfly emerging from her blouse. Soon the room filled with butterflies. She counted twenty-one. Her son, Samuel, had twenty-one children, one of whom was my great great grandmother Sarah. Her husband never returned from the war. It is thought that he died at Waterloo. This painting is an elegy for this ancestor and an affirmation that I came from butterflies. It is painted on a mirror that was covered with gesso.

My name and signature: My father christened Patty Christiena Willis, for my mother's grandmothers:  Patty Sessions Mann and Christiena Hunter Brown. Their lives and the  lives and legends of my ancestors have informed my own. The signature on  my paintings is Shinobu Christiena. Shinobu is a Japanese word that  means Patience which is the root of Patty, my ancestor's name. The kanji  for Shinobu comprises a sword above a heart.