Featured Artist Trixie Pitts

Combining vivid color and expressive lines, artist Trixie Pitts paints large abstract-expressionist paintings that are filled with movement and energy. Learn more about this artist and her work on her website.

 

 

I have been blessed with an international lifestyle! Originally from Canada, I have lived in Europe and Asia as well as the United States, where I recently relocated to Nashville after ten years in New York City. As a child I loved “coloring” and remember clearly a color-by-number color pencil set I had. Having always heard that I was “the smart one” and that I would be a doctor, I went into science, but drawing things under the microscope and making diagrams were by far my favorite tasks.

 

 

After graduating, while visiting Europe, I read Irving Stone’s “Lust For Life” about Van Gogh and decided I needed to make a change as he did. I went back and began to pursue art, a decision I never regretted and never veered from.

 

 

My science studies gave me an eye for detail and I began my career as a portrait artist, who also painted realistic landscapes, all the time thinking, “I wish I could get more feeling in my paintings.”

 

 

It wasn’t until I began to face my past and the severe early trauma I had endured that my painting began to evolve. As I began to re-experience and accept my emotions and all my struggles, they began to appear in my painting, transformed.

 

 

I began to believe that I could sometimes share with people who I really was instead of always pretending. At the same time, I stopped trying to please people with my painting, but rather to express my true self. That was liberating.

 

 

That is what painting and drawing are all about for me, connecting with my inner self at a subconscious level (that Buddhists feel we all share), and bringing it to the canvas without my thinking mind getting in the way.

 

 

I usually begin a painting with no real agenda. I just make some marks and then try to just let one thing lead to another. I just let one mark, one color, speak to me and lead me to the next. Even if I begin with a vague idea, as in the recent two paintings about the “artist in his studio,” I try not to think about it but to feel and just trust my own process.

 

 

Being able to let go and let things happen with the belief that random events will only make it better in the end, never expecting perfection but rather accentuating and trusting the unexpected, has helped me to do so in my everyday life. Believing in myself as an artist has helped me to value myself in all areas of my life!

 

 

I have two favorite quotes. The first is by Bob Ross, “There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.” So true! If I let the “accidents” happen, the paintings are always enhanced! The second quote is by my former abstract painting advisor, Larry Poons, “Trixie, try to say goodbye the way you say hello!”  That is the best advice, to paint with gusto and abandon to the end and not start trying to “tweak” or fix anything.

 

Artist Trixie Pitts invites you to follow her on Facebook.

 

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