Artist of the Week: Tiffany Bozic

I have known of Tiffany Bozic for maybe a year and a half now, and I find her to be a primary inspiration, here is a little bit about why: 

Tiffany Bozic is one of those artists that somehow is able to both eat her cake and have it too. She is California’s Academy of Science first Artist in Residence, she shows all over the world, she is often compared to the likes of John Audubon and Ernst Haeckel, and well, she lives in California. Tiffany’s story, however, is different than what one might expect. She is self-taught. A degree in art is usually not only seen as a qualification of you as an artist, but, sometimes more importantly, as a way for you as an artist to form connections within the art world.

In the magazine Hi-Fructose, where she was recently interviewed, she credits her success to hard work. In the interview Tiffany is quoted as saying, “I believe that people aren’t born with talent. They earn it form a lifetime of hard work. Most of my ideas come to me during the process of creation, while the gritty gears were turning and my hands were busy. Also, if you wait for someone else to come around and give you permission or validate your motives you could be waiting a long time and no one knows how much time you really have.”

Here you can particularly see her method. She paints on boards of maple that have been bleached until they are almost white. The bleaching gives her the tone she uses in order to unify each work's color scheme, and the choice of maple is due to it's tight grain. This tight grain means that the paint does not bleed throughout the grain. She also paints in acrylic which is watered down to an almost watercolor consistency. Painting in acrylic means that she does not have to prime the board, and can paint directly onto the wood. This allows her to use the natural beauty of the wood as part of her composition.