Robyn is a self-taught artist who lives in Moosehead Nova Scotia with her partner and fur children (pets). Her art has always been very different than the normal concept of art. When she was a little girl she was often on her own doing things differently such as playing in the woods with all her animal friends both wild and tame. Her first pictures were all about animals and natural things, and one of the first pictures that she consciously remembers drawing was a small mural on the wall of her bedroom when she was 7 years old. This primitive style picture was of her dog Bandit, who had recently been killed, one of her cats and an attempt at a giraffe. She still has this drawing, done on a board with Crayola markers. All through elementary school she had a notepad by her side, and often drew pictures during class time, mostly of dogs and other creatures. Robyn was not encouraged a lot as a child to do anything with her art, except by her aunt Susan, who would always give her art and craft supplies as gifts.

  When Robyn reached high school she enrolled in art classes. The first two years of high school she had a wonderful teacher named Roberta Fields. She gave her encouragement to do art her own way. Paul O'Tool ,was the next great teacher and she took his art class the following year. He encouraged her to expand her art in her own directions, and helped her to discover William Blake’s work, which was similar to hers. Her teacher brought various animal skulls and convinced the other teachers to let him move the rest of the taxidermy specimens from the science lab into the art room to be used as still life subjects, thus started her fascination with taxidermy. Her teacher was quite impressed with her work in restoring the animals when she had cleaned every speck of dust off of them and made the broken parts look like they were never damaged. Robyn then started bringing in skulls from home to paint in class. Her cats were avid hunters and there were always little skulls around to work with.
  

  When they moved back to the country she started to regain interest in working with natural things. She was not sure what type of art she wanted to do, but she knew that it had to be something more spiritual and with a purpose. In school she had been doing mostly sketching or painting but now she wanted to do something three dimensional, something people could touch, but not sculpture. She started working on landscaping the part of the property that would become her pet cemetery, as she had lost one of their pets, her dog-named slash fingers. Robyn had always loved landscaping, and she has made a beautiful place of rest for her pets that have passed on; she is still not finished her work there. Working on the land gives her a sense of being closer to the earth, but there were still many questions to be answered. 

   She found a spiritual group online, where she found people with similar life experiences to share and gain knowledge. She met a woman named Evelyn Spendlove on line. Evelyn and Robyn became close friends, and when Evelyn was ready to publish her first book she asked Robyn to do the illustrations for it. Robyn began the work on the paintings for her book "Messages of the Angels", This was Robyn’s first time being published as an artist.

  Many people look at some of her work such as the paintings of road kill, the painted skulls, the work with leather and other animal parts, as morbid (or worse). This can’t be further from the truth; for Robyn, death is a natural part of the life cycle, not something to be feared or unspoken about. Her lack of fear on the subject comes from a scientific and spiritual understanding of life and death, as well as a reverence for all living things.

  Robyn is currently working on an elemental guardians project with coyote skulls. Each skull is decorated to represent one of the elements, and is smudged with sage prior to and after decoration. A green one is called earth, blue is water, red and orange is fire. There is one missing in the set, air.\

  She can be contacted through the art association, or directly through her email address. She can be found set up at the local art shows and association events to sell and display her work. She also plans to sell some of her work at McCourt’s Oceanside Retreat Studio, Beaver Harbor in the future.