Rapsheet

When I was young I wanted my paintings to heal the earth. Sweating & panting, I learned the earth itself is healing power. I turned shamanic & goofy. “Spirits,” I call, “shove my paint around. Trick us. Break our hearts with beauty. Tiny. Vast. Make us leap & cry & sing love songs.”

Sandy Eastoak was born in Lexington, KY, and grew up in New England, where she was raised by trees.

She studied art at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH, and apprenticed with Yugoslavian potter Lou Fish in Castries, St. Lucia. She received an interdisciplinary MA from the University of Oregon, writing her thesis on “Art and Environmental Consciousness.” She studied art therapy at Lane Community College, and landscape painting at Pacific Academy of Fine Art.

An Environmental Experience Fellow of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, she helped establish the Environmental Studies Center at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and completed the Forestry & Wildlife Conservation Program of the Professional Career Development Institute of Atlanta, GA.

She had her first solo show at the University of Oregon Museum of Art in 1977. Since then her work has appeared in group and solo shows in Berkeley, Bodega Bay, Forestville, Guerneville, Occidental, Pt. Reyes, Rohnert Park, San Francisco, San Geronimo, San Rafael, Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, & Sonoma, CA; Avon & Simsbury, CT; Muncie, IN; Taos, NM; New York, NY; Coos Bay, Eugene, & Sunriver, OR; & Woodstock, VT. She is represented in public & private collections in 24 states and 14 countries.

She has two grown daughters who helped her edit & illustrate Dharma Family Treasures: Sharing Buddhism with Children, published by North Atlantic in 1994.

Besides painting, her obsessions are the edges & surfaces of water, music, dancing, poetry, and painter Robert Breyer.