Rebecca Artemisa
Found this little interview of the artist Rebecca Artemisa. Her show, Ghost Friends, runs thru November 6th @ Meat Cheese Bread | 1406 Southeast Stark Street Portland, OR 97214 | Curated by Greg Pitters of HungryEyeball
Your art deals a lot with spirits, ghosts, nature, and usually has a girl with black hair, can you tell us about these reoccurring themes?
Ghosts and the celebration of death as an extension of life is a huge part of Mexican culture, and I am Mexican/Mestiza-American, so I draw a lot of passion and inspiration from that. My mom and family members have pictures of happy skeletons dancing all over our houses, and put up Dia de los Muertos altars every year.
Nature was always a very sacred thing to my family when I was growing up. As a child I spent many family vacations building trails with my dad and brothers around my grandparents house in Arizona border town desert, staying on Native American Reservations (living off fry bread and honey), hiking river canyons in Utah, exploring tide pools in Big Sur and sleeping in tiny motels in the mountains of Northern California, where we would wake up to elk in the early morning outside our window. We met a lot of interesting people and learned to have a lot of respect for the earth and life at a very young age. Those experiences and feelings have stayed with me, and only get stronger year after year. I grew up in a city, but my heart is in nature.
The girls with black hair are sometimes me, and sometimes like extensions of me. The girls I paint are often a lot sassier and a little more rambunctious than I am in my real life! Also they are tough. Lots of times they are dealing with arrows, snakebites, fire or ghosts haunting them, and they are dealing with it like pros. I am kind of a shy pansy who gets flustered easily and likes to press flowers as a hobby, so these girls are wonderful to paint. I live more fully through them, and work through rough bits in my life better because I keep painting them.
The Pine Cone Gentleman 