Sandra Vista - LA Based Fine Artist

For more than 45 years, since I started my art degree at the University of Arizona, I have considered myself a painter.  My MFA at California State University, Long Beach (1982), was in “painting”.   However, for the past twenty plus years I have been working on more labor-intensive mixed- media works.  Since I was a kid, I was an undeclared Dadaist, becoming a devotee of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray which began in my early college years. Having limited access to art materials in my childhood, I used everyday objects and homemade art materials for my artwork.  I remember making my first collage at fourteen before I was introduced to the word “collage”.  My two-dimensional design instructor, at the University of Arizona (1974), commented that I had a natural inclination for collage and assemblage after I created a construction from pieces of distressed wood and rusty metal for his final project of “make something with orange”.

Mark Rothko was my first painting inspiration.  I was in middle school when my English teacher Mrs. Edith Morgan, took my 7th grade class to the University of Arizona Art Museum.  I had never been to an art museum before this field trip.  Seeing a Rothko painting of sea foam greens was a true epiphany and life changer.  That was the first time I remember wanting to become an artist and a painter.  My paintings still begin with a horizon line reminiscent of Rothko’s color field paintings.  In addition, my previous painting and drawing instructors, along with their techniques, are present with me every time I begin a new drawing or painting.  There is the dry brush technique, the dirty brush technique, masking tape for stripes, complementary colors, dissonance, patterns and more patterns, and formal issues.  I could be swaddled in the elements and principles of design.

I have been linked with the Pattern and Decoration Movement from the late 1970’s and 1980’s.  Also, Influenced by the Memphis Design Group of the same time.  Some of my painting instructors from San Diego State (BA Art 1978) were painting with bold colors and patterns related to these movements. When I began my graduate program at California State University, Long Beach (1979-82), my paintings were more gestural brush strokes with a grid as a framework.  As I started to develop my painting style, I began to emulate the inclusion of stripes as created by my instructor Pat Cauley.  He used a striping tool to create stripes on a canvas. I use the traditional masking tape for my stripes. My paintings also included  pattern designs derived from Japanese emblem motifs, Indian tapestries, and Native American weaving and pottery designs.  Also, I was influenced by local pattern painters such as Miriam Schapiro, Cynthia Watson, and Kim McConnell.  Stuart Davis, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella were also influential in their use of patterns, especially Frank Stella and his Exotic Bird Series.

My mixed-media work provides a mediative relief and a relationship with the feeling of home, the beauty of the “prosaic” and domestic arts.  Stringing multi-colored beads together to apply to dried gourds help to put me in a “creative zone” that is a welcome element during making art.  Art can be hard work, there is a form of relief in stringing and pinning beads to surfaces with paint and acrylic gel medium.  The strings of beads are considered three dimensional patterns of color in space.  The beaded gourds are still a form of painting to me.  
The zipper tab series also provides mediative relief and the labor intensive quality of the work creates work that has a definite beginning and end related to the size of the panel format.  The zipper tabs fit into my Dadaist influence of using everyday objects as art forms.  Also, the materials have biographical symbolism in relationship to my father’s livelihood of a fabric and notions buyer and my maternal grandfather’s profession as a tailor.  My use of the zipper tabs is a new interpretation of some of my family’s professions.

Ultimately, I need to include Christo as one of my ongoing influences. While I was at San Diego State (1976-1979) I was introduced to Christo at an exhibit he had at the La Jolla Contemporary Art Museum.  He spoke at the museum and presented a documentary of “The Running Fence”, as well as his wrapped object pieces.  Like Rothko, Christo helped to define the way I create art.  His abstraction of everyday objects, by wrapping them in fabric and tying them with rope made a significant impression on me.  As I continue to wrap everyday objects with strings of beads and to dip objects in paint and gel medium, I think of Christo and his definition of abstraction.