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Tina Johnson was born in 1965, and started participating in city mural and Art Deco projects in 1980. By 1983, she was winning local and national awards, with an exhibit in Washington, DC. Tina exhibited her artwork until moving to Seattle in 1989 to open a mural & graphic arts buisness. Seattle is also where she learned how to cook, which is a skill that has literally taken her around the world. 1993 found her in New York city dividing her time between mosaic artwork and temporary jobs on Wall Street to pay the bills. In 1994, Tina literally joined the Big Apple Circus as a full time cook, which exposed her to sideshow poster artwork. She took a sketching tour of Europe and South Africa in 1998, before signing up to cook at McMurdo Station, Antarctica for the 1999 season, where she met another cook named Kirby White. They were married in New Zealand in 2001, and traveled around the world for their honeymoon. Kirby had the original bug for scrimshaw (as an Antarctic pastime), but Tina swiped one of his scavenged resin billiard balls to try her hand, and the rest is history.
Tina's newfound skill at scrimshaw found a huge audience among her fellow inmates in the big freeze. Antarctic wildlife were the subjects of choice, especially penguins! Orders exceeded time, and she found herself scrimming during the summer back home. Eventually word leaked out, and collectors started commissioning traditional nautical scrimshaw. Tina has designed & executed commemorative cue ball scrimshaws for Sir Edward Hillary and Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn in Lord of the Rings), among others.
Most of Tina's work is on fossil Mammoth ivory and the occassional cue ball, both of which are legal to carry to Antarctica and back. She also accepts commissions on privately owned marine ivory and Federally exempted whale teeth available in the state of Washington, where she now resides. |
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