Sally Strand quips she found her career path by opening a Chicago phone book. She was young, living in the city on an urban studies program involving documenting people in public housing, working as a secretary, and bored. She read art books to pass the time, but at some point she realized she could be in a job like that all her life unless she chose a direction. So she pulled out a phone book and opened it to the A’s. Instantly her eye landed on art school. She applied to Chicago’s American Academy of Art and with her first class there, she knew she was in the right place. “I thought, ‘Oh! This is me!’” she recalls.

As she speaks, Strand is sitting in her studio in a charmingly funky beach-house neighborhood in Capistrano Beach, CA, where her second-floor view catches sailboats on the water through a screen of tall pines on the nearby coastal bluff. Now 51, the
Colorado native has been living and painting full time in Southern California since the early 1980s. Her award-winning realist paintings—she works in both pastels and oils—were featured in a recent solo retrospective at the Bakersfield Art Museum in
Bakersfield, CA. She has exhibited and taught around the country, and her work is in numerous private and public collections. As she recounts how she got to this point, it’s clear that while the art school idea popped out at her from the phone book, it didn’t come out of the blue.

All through Strand's childhood years—first in Golden, CO, and later in Evergreen, west of Denver—a flow of creative energy surrounded her mother, whom she calls “one the most multitalented people I’ve ever met.” Her mother’s primary artistic
expression was in printmaking, but she also worked in jewelry, sculpture, and weaving. “We’ve had the most special relationship all my life,” Strand reflects. “I’d come home from school every day and sit on the step of her studio, and we’d talk.” Even now, at 81 and living nearby, her mother remains Strand’s most valued critic. Her father was in the insurance business, and while he didn’t take part in the family’s artistic activities, he supported and encouraged them.

One creative experience that stands out among the artist’s early memories involves handmade puppets. Her mother carved the puppets’ heads, sewed their costumes, and directed theatrical stories for them. Strand mostly remained backstage producing sound effects while her older brother, who later became an actor, voiced and operated the hand puppets. The trio took their show on the road, traveling around Colorado to perform. “I still have those puppets,” Strand notes wistfully. “They’re exquisite.”

Other aspects of Strand’s childhood were equally rich. Summers were spent in an old family home on a lake in the Wisconsin woods with no television—just imagination, nature, and play. When she was a young teen, the family moved from Golden to a cabin built into a mountainside on Upper Bear Creek near Evergreen. The creek tumbled over giant boulders not far from the cabin door. A climb to the cliff behind the cabin every evening took Strand to her special spot for sitting alone, gazing out over the tops of tall pines, and


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