BIO

A native of Rochester, New York, Jamie Lynn Williamson studied to be a dental assistant and began her professional career working for a children's dentist.  It took just a year, though, for her to realize "this wasn't the career for me.  I went on to floral design school, and later opened my own flower and gift shop.  My first dolls were cloth dolls made for my shop," says the artist, who had enjoyed painting, sewing and drawing as a child.  She gave up her shop after the birth of the first of her four children, but continued to make cloth dolls and sell them to stores in the area.

Early in 1997, Jamie was looking through a doll magazine in the hopes of getting some ideas for ways to improve her cloth dolls, when she "discovered what the world of one-of-a-kind doll art was all about.  I was so fascinated with what was being created, that I decided to give sculpting a try."  She loved working with various sculpting media, and abandoned her cloth dollmaking for creating one-of-a-kind Cernit pieces.  Today she creates twelve to fifteen dolls a year.  Making even that many is something of a juggling act, as her dollmaking takes second place to her family.

For Jamie, the joy of dollmaking is "to begin with nothing but a lifeless lump of clay and slowly see it evolve into the face of a young girl who almost seems alive.  I rarely work from photographs, finding it much more fulfilling to begin without any preconceived notions of what the doll will look like."

Read more about Jamie in this article at DollReader.com:
http://dollreader.com/articles/110-the-art-of-jamie-williamson