My Mom is an artist, and a prolific one: she has been painting nearly her entire life. She favors watercolor, but she has done pen-and-ink illustrations, cartoons, oil paintings, and colored pencil sketches. All through college (and beyond), my sister Judy and I (and other near relatives) received "Martha Cards" -- hand-drawn greeting cards stuffed with cartoons cut out of the newspaper, articles from the local papers, and quick notes. She has done commission work, placed her artwork in numerous galleries and volunteered paintings for the local church and community fair. The walls of my suburban Georgia home would be quite barren indeed without her talents (and I'm not entirely sure if I am allowed to hang artwork done by anyone else).

Through it all, she has painstakingly kept track of most of her work on index cards and photographs kept in numerous file boxes: the studio window is my attempt to provide an integrated tool for managing all these notes and photographs in an online repository, with an eye toward someday publishing a book of her work.

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