Dawn Marie Rozzo’s paintings can be found in private collections across the United States. When Dawn isn’t in the studio, she’s working in her flower garden accompanied by her two nosey cats. Her lifelong love of nature informs her semi-abstract collages and landscapes. Dawn has also been an art educator for over 25 years. For the past 15, she’s focused on providing art-related programming for the elderly and those living with dementia. Dawn and her art can be found online at dawnrozzo.com.
When Karin first floated the idea of illustrating her chicken haiku, my immediate thought was Yes! Creating art within her framework of beautiful poems made visual decision-making a pleasure. I work in pencil, watercolor, acrylics, and collage. My collages contain handmade papers and/or papers reassembled from discarded books, which are then prepared with clear gesso for painting. I appreciated the irony of using disassembled books to create illustrations for a new book. For most of the chicken images here, I created illustrations to match Karin’s poems. However, a few times Karin saw my art and then wrote complementary haiku. It was fascinating to see how the two art forms played off each other.