avg_rating: 3.96
name: Jan Thornhill
about: I was born in 1955 in Sudbury, but spent most of my childhood in southern Ontario where, encouraged by my artist mother and engineer/inventor father, I developed a life-long passion for both art and the natural world. I spent a lot of time exploring the fields, woods, ponds, and streams near where I lived, and was an avid collector of things I found. I brought home all kinds of treasures – skulls and fossils, bird feathers and empty nests, insects, snake skins, fallen leaves. Eventually I labeled everything and made a museum in the basement. I thought I’d get rich by charging a 5¢ entry fee…but my mum was the only one who paid! After high school, I attended the Ontario College of Art where I had fun making experimental films and videos – no I was born in 1955 in Sudbury, but spent most of my childhood in southern Ontario where, encouraged by my artist mother and engineer/inventor father, I developed a life-long passion for both art and the natural world. I spent a lot of time exploring the fields, woods, ponds, and streams near where I lived, and was an avid collector of things I found. I brought home all kinds of treasures – skulls and fossils, bird feathers and empty nests, insects, snake skins, fallen leaves. Eventually I labeled everything and made a museum in the basement. I thought I’d get rich by charging a 5¢ entry fee…but my mum was the only one who paid! After high school, I attended the Ontario College of Art where I had fun making experimental films and videos – not drawing and painting. For about ten years after that, I illustrated freelance for magazines and newspapers, and did odd jobs such as sewing thousands of beads and sequins on Dolly Parton’s dresses. Finally, in the late eighties, I switched to the much richer life of creating children’s books. From the beginning, the aim of these wildlife-based books has been to foster in young readers a love of art, nature and the environment. I live in the Kawarthas in a house in the woods that my husband and I built. As well as making books, I grow organic vegetables, raise a few chickens each year, make bread from captured wild yeast, and wander around in the woods looking for wild mushrooms, slime molds, beetles and animal skulls. A lot of the things I find – skulls, snake skins, desiccated insects, a mummified bat &amp; hummingbirds, etc. – have made their way into what I call my “museum-in-a-bag,” a collection of natural treasures I share with kids when I visit schools. I’m an obsessive observer of the world around me, so much so that I consider a day I haven’t learned something to be a day wasted. ...more