Throughout my life I’ve made art. Art has enriched me and has been a solace to me during difficult times, as well as an expression of joy during happy times. I turn to nature when doing my work. I focus on shapes, lines, and color to express the essence of what holds meaning for me in what I see.
I first studied drawing and painting seriously at local colleges in the Washington, DC, metro area, where I grew up, and in San Francisco while I was doing invited artist apprenticeships as a teenager.
I focused on drawing, then painting, then weaving tapestry designs when I first showed my work in a solo exhibit in Santa Fe in November 1974. At eighteen, I was accepted in my first juried museum show, which took place at the Albuquerque Museum in March 1974.
In the summer of 1973 I was invited to do an artist apprenticeship with Nancy and Janusz Kozikowski. I first met Georgia O’Keeffe that summer when she and her business manager Doris Bry came for tea one day. The following year, I spent every day with O’Keeffe for several months, including weekends alone with her at Ghost Ranch. I was nineteen.
Between 1975 and 1980 I completed the fine arts program at the University of New Mexico, where I enjoyed an emphasis on watercolor painting with Sam Smith, a former student of Nicolai Fechin.
Having grown up in the DC area during the Kennedy years there was a focus in my public education on the arts as well as on developing a social consciousness and giving back to those less fortunate. Five years after I was widowed at age twenty-two, I took a workshop with Elizabeth Kubler Ross when she came to Santa Fe. I earned a graduate degree in counseling and counseled the bereaved and the dying for many years. I continued creating art during that time.
My work has been in twelve juried museum exhibits, including three solo exhibits. Today I enjoy painting large works of art in oils.
Wanda Kidwell Brasgala, New Mexico
