Sandy Heybroek was born in Lloydminster and moved to British Columbia at the age of four. She lived first at Grand Forks and later at several places in the Okanagan Valley. In the late nineteen forties she moved to southern Vancouver Island where she first took up oil painting seriously.

Although largely self-taught, Sandy received some valuable instruction and criticism of her early works from Leonard Scheu of Laguna Beach, California, a noted artist and instructor both in the United States and Canada.

In 1963, on a trip with her husband, Bill, Sandy visited several of the old Indian Villages in the upper Skeena River Region. Here she felt in love with the beauty and power of the old totem poles. This was previous to the totem pole restoration project and at that time there were still over sixty poles, both standing and fallen, to be found between the five main villages. Since that time Sandy has revisited the Skeena area many times as well as the majority of old villages to be of the Kwakiutl and Nootka along with the remote and lonely deserted village sites in the Queen Charlotte Islands of the Haida peoples. Many of these sites were explored using Sandy and Bill’s own sixteen foot boat.

Because Sandy refuses to simply copy old photos in archives and museums and has instead sketched and painted these magnificent carvings from life, her authentic paintings and brush and ink drawings of the totem poles has few if any peers. Today she continues to seek out the very few remaining poles that she has not personally seen and had an opportunity to study and paint.