Thank you for visiting to my website. I am a book artist who teaches pointed brush lettering as well as paste paper and paste cloth classes. I currently live in Albuquerque, NM. My husband and I moved here from Maryland in 2015 with our dog, Samwise. During the course of my life I have lived in New Guinea, Australia, Iowa, Japan, Zambia, Canada, Malaysia, Florida, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Maryland, Russia. Not exactly in that order. All those places have certainly become part of me and my work.

After a less-than-stellar four years of university where I obtained a BA in Comparative Religion from the University of Iowa, I leapt at the chance to teach English as a foreign language in Japan in 1970. There I met my future husband, the intrepid documentary filmmaker, Neill McKee who had paused in Tokyo after two years of teaching in North Borneo where he co-founded the North Borneo Frodo Society. 

My first encounter with pointed brush lettering was with the school writing master, Hisao Yabe, while I was teaching English in Japan from 1970–72. After Neill and I married in Zambia in 1972 we spent six months in Ottawa where I studied Japanese painting, sumi-e, with Tomoko Kodama before we moved to Malaysia for two years. There I studied intermittently at the Malaysian Institute of Art under its founder Chung Chen Sun. I was happy to discover western calligraphy in Ottawa, Canada in 1980 after our second child was born and I knew that I had found my vocation. In 1983 I went to my first calligraphy conference which was held in Chicago. The theme of the conference was Book Arts. Although I dabbled in book making, I did not take it seriously until our family moved to Bangladesh in 1990. From there we moved to Kenya in 1994 and on to Uganda in 1999. Since carting around large framed calligraphic art was not practical I found myself drawn to the highly portable art of making books. 

Since the late 80’s I have been taking pointed brush lettering classes whenever I could. Studying with Marilyn Reaves, Judy Melvin, Carl Rohrs multiple times, Mike Gold and Julie Wildman. Some of my books with pointed brush lettering are in Queen’s University’s Douglas Library, Kingston, Ontario https://elizabethmckeebooks.com/from-a-circle-of-love, the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art https://elizabethmckeebooks.com/road-guide, Stanford University’s Green Library https://elizabethmckeebooks.com/inversnaid-1 and in private collections.  https://elizabethmckeebooks.com/departure   https://elizabethmckeebooks.com/inversnaid-2   https://elizabethmckeebooks.com/that-nature-is-a-heraclitean-fire-and-the-comfort-of-the-resurrection 

I spent my time during the pandemic creating an introductory series of pointed brush classes to help make lettering with a pointed brush more accessible to beginners and have been teaching it online.

I was introduced to paste paper play on my friend, Heather Mallet’s back porch in Ottawa sometime in the ’90’s but was not terribly interested in it until I saw it used as a background for fine art. Since moving to New Mexico I have developed an exploratory class in which students create reference books that they can use for recreating patterns and background. I last taught this in the summer of 2021 and Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. Here is a link to the article that I wrote for the Escribiente newsletter. https://www.escribiente.org/newsletter/2021/Escribiente-News-2021-02_print.pdf

My work is included in the collections of the late Queen Mother of England, the City of Ottawa, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Harvard’s Houghton Library, Queen’s University’s Douglas Library, Kingston, Ontario, the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bowdoin College’s Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, Stanford University’s Green Library as well as private collections around the world.