biography

Artist Biography

Dawn Howkinson Siebel was born during a snowstorm in Lake County, Indiana, in 1950.  Her first career in the theatre relocated her to New York City and gave her a Broadway credit, but lost appeal as a long-term profession.  She became a dyer, working in batik to create a line of t-shirts she sold through craft fairs and retail stores up and down the East Coast.  Dawn has a t-shirt in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution from this period.  After three years Dawn retired the t-shirts and began hand-coloring silk with dye processes she devised herself, eventually selling her collection of one-of-a-kind kimonos to Bergdorf Goodman.  She also mounted four solo shows of batik and collaged paintings in New York City between 1975 and 1980.  In 1985, Dawn embarked on an 18-month trip around the world with a set of watercolors packed into her luggage.  This led to a decade of watercolor painting with a day job in publishing and thoughts of illustrating children’s books.

In 1994, she abandoned New York City for Boulder, Colorado, and finally found the gumption to devote herself fully to fine art.  In 1999 she switched to oil paint as her medium of choice, occasionally indulging a secret passion for sculpture by creating assemblage.  Dawn is self-taught and always learning.

In the spring of 2010, she moved to the Hudson River Valley of New York State and is currently consumed with the mountains of details needed to realize her project, “Better Angels: The Firefighters of 9/11.”  Stay tuned.