That's not a typographical error in the headline. Gail mally-mack's hyphenated last name is spelled with lowercase letters. It is her own choice. She explains that Mally was her father's name, Mack her former husband's. When she got divorced, she tried using Mally, but when people called her Mrs. Mally, she realized it didn't fit.

"Mrs. Mally was my mother, not me," she explains.

That's when she decided on mally-mack with small letters and her first name with a capital.

"That's who I am; I'm Gail," she says.

Gail signs her art, which she has exhibited for more than a decade in her native Michigan, with her individualized signature. Since moving to Chester a year ago, her work has been shown at Gallery One in Old Saybrook, where she was a guest artist, and at the Chester Gallery.

She also created one of the scarecrows at the Florence Griswold Museum exhibit for Halloween in 2010. That scarecrow now sits outside the door to her studio in Chester. The challenge was to fashion a scarecrow based on a famous artist and Gail chose Marc Chagall.

Chagall's work, she says, appeals to her for the structure that underlines his paintings.

"You look at things that at first seem random, things all over the place, and then you break it down and understand form, shape, and composition," she says.

Like one of the figures in most of Chagall's paintings, Gail's scarecrow is playing a violin.

Gail, who taught in Michigan at a number of places including the Detroit Art Institute, Wayne State University, and Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, is now starting a series of art lessons at her studio in Chester. She is aware that teaching, particularly in a creative field, requires a balance between giving guidance and respecting the artistic impulse of the creator.

"I never want to impose who I am on who the other person is," she says; instead, her goal is to draw out the creative spark that resides in the individual artist.

Gail says she has loved both to draw and to write as long as she can remember, but it wasn't something encouraged either in her family or by school.

"I went to an all-girls Catholic high school and the only drawing we had was a course in fashion design," she says.

When she looked forward to a career, Gail recalls there seemed relatively few options.

"You could be a teacher, a nurse, or a nun," she says.

Because she loved science, Gail chose nursing at Mercy College in Detroit.

"I loved the way things looked, why leaves were green, why things grow," she recalls.

She used her art talent, but not officially.

"I must have drawn the whole anatomy book," she says.

She became a psychiatric nurse, but left the profession to raise her family of four daughters and one son. All the while, she says, she was taking drawing and painting classes, involving herself deeper in the world of the arts.

In the mid-1990s, with her children grown, she made a crucial decision: She would go back to school to study art. She spent two years at Bennington College and received her master's in fine arts. She debated going to New York after graduation, but decided to return to Michigan, where she immersed herself in the Detroit art world.

"I still had business in Detroit; I needed closure," she explains.

A year ago, she decided she needed something else: a change of scene. One of her daughters lives in Red Hook, a town in Duchess County, New York, and a sister lives in Essex, which prompted her move to this part of the country. She writes a regular art blog (www.artbecoming.com), which she says allows her to keep up with many of her fellow artists and former students in Detroit.

The move has had an effect on what she is painting. She says it's opened up new ways of thinking about what she is doing; it has even changed her color palette from dark and somber colors to blues, greens, and reds. There are at least 100 tubes of oil paint on a large table in her studio, but there is order in the seeming randomness. The tubes are grouped by color starting with earth tones and progressing through the color wheel. She uses oils, acrylic paint, charcoal, and even sand in her large abstractions to create layers of meaning and expression.

Some of Gail's most original works are not on canvas at all; they are three-dimensional. Walking one day, she saw a discarded book outside in a state of partial decomposition. It was a book on the First World War. To Gail, it suggested an entirely new way to make a statement about the world in which we live. She waxed the pages of the book, encircled them in wire, and created her own statement about conflict: a piece she calls Bound and Gagged.

She has transformed a number of other weathered and decaying books, one a history of technology she treated with wax, cotton, and wire so it can no longer be opened. It is, she says, a comment on how technology changes and how we move on from what once served us.

In addition to the books, Gail has done a number of sculptures with weathered slabs of sandstone connected to each other by wires that run from piece to piece to give visual representation to human communication.

It is that communication, Gail feels, that is vital to artistic expression. Art, she says, is not about mirroring reality, but about feeling it.

"Art is vital to the human experience; it brings hope to the world," she says.