By Christine Hamelin
with photography by Bernard Clark
After years of hard work as an architect, Debra Krakow has finally achieved her dream of becoming a full-time artist. A lifelong learner, she is delighted to be able to spend all her time making beautiful objects, trying new techniques and gaining more skills. She and her husband, who chose an independent rural lifestyle over convenience and consumerism, have built a fulfilling life that matches their creative goals and their deeply held values.
Debra and her sisters, Eve and Linda, grew up in Montreal in a house built by their father, architect Hyman Krakow. Their mother, Sally, was a stay-at-home mom who had studied fine art. When the girls were little, their parents built a country house in Vermont to accommodate Hyman’s passion for model airplanes and Sally’s wish for a huge vegetable garden. “We spent weekends and summers there. Our mom was into traditional crafts; we’d carve apples and let them shrivel into old-man heads and make dolls out of them. Seeing her do these things planted a seed, I think,” says Debra, an articulate woman with bright brown eyes and curly hair.
Her teenage years were difficult. When Debra was 15, Sally died of breast cancer. “It was really tough, but my family made it through.” Debra’s passion when growing up had been ballet; in high school, she was taking nine ballet classes a week. She was crushed to learn at 16 that while she could have a career as a ballet teacher, she wasn’t going to be a classical ballerina. . . .
