Grace Goldeen Ogawa is an American author-illustrator of fantasy and science fiction. Her works include the serial Professor Odd and Driving Arcana novellas, The Adventures of Bouragner Felpz short story collections, and the fantasy novel Lucena in the House of Madgrin, for which she also provided the covers and interior illustrations. Her art features fantastic themes like her Planet Horses, Strange Owls, and Death and the Cat paintings. Known professionally as Goldeen Ogawa, she publishes through her indie press, Heliopause Productions. She lives in Bend, Oregon.
Early Life and Family
Goldeen was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1987. Her family moved to Three Rivers, a small community in the Sierra Nevada foothills outside Sequoia National Park, in 1993, where she was raised. Her mother, Marian Goldeen, was a Smalltalk guinea pig at Xerox PARC, and her father, Arthur Ogawa, has a PhD in high energy physics. Her parents met while they were both working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and married in 1986. She has a younger brother, Evan, born in 1990. She is of Ashkenazi, English, Scottish, Irish, and Japanese descent.
Education
Goldeen’s parents enrolled her in Kindergarten but pulled her out shortly afterward. Inspired by the writings of John Holt they decided to raise her Unschooled, along with her brother. Goldeen excelled at self-directed learning and developed a wide collection of knowledge and interests and an insatiable curiosity about the world in general, which she continues to expand into her adult life.
Artistic Development
Always a passionate storyteller, Goldeen began drawing at an early age, filling notebooks with pictures of birds and horses. Her first stories were dictated to her mother before she learned to read. She also enjoyed swimming, horseback riding, mountain biking and acting. It was after attending several theater workshops and auditions, and discovering all the parts she wanted to play were for men, that she decided at the age of 13 to put acting on hold in order to write some stories with roles that she would like to play. This project soon expanded to include other underrepresented types of people, and continues to the present day.
As a child Goldeen enjoyed best those stories with fantastical elements, such as T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone, and talking animals, such as Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy Mysteries, or both, like C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. She was deeply impressed by storytellers who were also illustrators, particularly James Gurney (Dinotopia) Jill Barklem (Brambly Hedge), Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes) and Rumiko Takahashi (Ranma 1/2, Inuyasha). She was greatly inspired by the films of Hayao Miyazaki, particularly My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke.
A major turning point in her creative development occurred when, at the age of ten, her mother introduced her to the work of British fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones. Previously, Goldeen had struggled with reading, having her parents read books aloud to her. But around the time she discovered Jones’s work something finally clicked, and her reading skills grew in leaps and bounds. Jones’s novel Hexwood is the first book she can remember reading entirely to herself. She went on to read everything by Diana Wynne Jones that she could find, and it was an essay Jones had written specifically for young writers that gave her the gumption to finish her first novel. Diana Wynne Jones’s books gave her the drive to create the brightest, biggest, most exciting and interesting stories she could. As tribute she sometimes leaves references to Jones’s stories hidden in her own.
As a teenager Goldeen wrote her earliest novels and produced two webcomics (one co-illustrated with her brother). She began developing a detailed fantasy world that would later become the setting for many of her stories. At the same time she pursued physical activities such as horseback riding, mountain biking, and whitewater rafting. She competed in the California Appaloosa Breed show circuit in 2002, raced in the 2003 Sea Otter Classic Cross Country, and worked as a whitewater guide from 2006-2010. These experiences have heavily influenced the environment and action in her art and writing.
As an adult she continues to practice her craft, continually exploring new concepts, visions, and ideas, and taking every opportunity to expand her knowledge of the world. She eventually returned to acting—after a fashion—becoming a narrator reading stories aloud to other people, where she gets to play all the parts.
Career and Projects
In 2009 Goldeen began attending genre conventions, exhibiting in the World Fantasy Art Show and becoming a fixture in the AnthroCon Dealer’s Room. In 2011 she took Goldeen Ogawa as her professional name in honor of her mother, with whom she works closely in the production of her books. In 2012 she launched her indie press, Heliopause Productions, and has been self-publishing ever since. In this time she produced her Year of the God-Fox webcomic and the Adventures of Bouragner Felpz, Professor Odd, and Driving Arcana books. In 2020 she released her first novel, Lucena in the House of Madgrin. Since 2017 she has run a Patreon where she shares in-depth breakdowns of her paintings, scans from her private sketchbook, and excerpts of her latest writing. Her work has been featured on the cover of independent newspapers as well as convention art shows, and her books are distributed globally through Amazon, Apple Books and Kobo.
Style and Themes
Goldeen works primarily with traditional media, favoring colored pencil, watercolor, graphite pencil, and brush pen. A self-taught artist, she developed her skills by practical application and studying the art of those she most admired. Her illustration style varies in order to serve the story, ranging from realism to cartoonish and sometimes combining them in the same picture. Her favorite subjects include animals and the natural world—usually with some fantastic element added. Thematically she enjoys depicting scenes that are suggestive of a story and bridge the gap between reality and imagination. In addition to Gurney, Barklem, Watterson, Takahashi and Miyazaki, she finds inspiration in the work of the classic painters Diego Velásquez and Vincent van Gogh, and contemporary artists Trina Schart Hyman, Charles Vess, John Picacio, Ursula Vernon, Balaa, and Tran Nguyen.
Goldeen’s stories all have some fantasy or speculative element, but they range from cozy detective mysteries (Bouragner Felpz) to wild and colorful action-adventures (Professor Odd) to dark, textured explorations of humanity (Driving Arcana). In keeping with her initial goal of writing parts she would like to play, Goldeen’s work often centers around characters with mixed attributes, or those not typically seen in a leading role. Although her work features characters of diverse backgrounds, body types, genders, religions and sexualities (and sometimes species), her stories are mostly concerned with exploring the similarities between different people, and finding ways forward through compassion, patience, mutual understanding and tolerance. Alongside Diana Wynne Jones, Goldeen’s writing has been influenced by the work of Robert Graves, Astrid Lindgren, James Thurber, Susanna Clarke, Neal Stephenson, Ursula K. Le Guin and Terry Pratchett.
Personal Life
When she is not creating art and stories, Goldeen enjoys mountain biking, swimming, and practicing kettlebells, hiking with her dog, eating froyo and cuddling her cat. She has volunteered with the staff of AnthroCon and is known in the furry fandom as Rhondi the Volcano Chimera. In her hometown of Bend, Oregon, she is a part-time lifeguard and year-round bike commuter.
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