Aliza & Her Monsters

Artist Biography:  Aliza is a self-taught oil painter living and working in Seattle. Born and raised on the southern shore of Whidbey Island she grew up with her identical twin but moved to the mainland as an adult. Aliza grew up painting and drawing animals, her “monsters” and keeping them in a collection her mother refers to as “the zoo”. As art was never presented as a viable path through life and she became a nurse practitioner instead of pursuing her love of painting, but her passion for art persisted and she found her way back to painting in full force and has not put the brush down since.  Difficult emotions and experiences are the threads that tie her work together. When she’s (rarely) not at the easel or working in the clinic, you can find her running in the mountains or spending time with the shiba-inu who owns her.

Artist Statement:  I've been making the same painting since I was a kid. I didn’t have a wonderful family dynamic growing up: my parents divorced when we were young, and I saw just how awful people can be to each other. Painting animals, my monsters, was the get-away from the chaos around me.  After people, animals are a relief. I return to a lot of the same subjects and find comfort in being able to revisit them when I need to.  It’s important to understand your origins, where you came from and what glued your bones together to effectively tell your story.

Growing up in a small town, I am more familiar with wide open spaces with actual trees and wildlife than shopping malls and skyscrapers. The big event of the year on the island is the county fair. That’s actually where all the wild bunnies came from, legend has it. A couple escaped one year, and well, you know how rabbits are. For me, painting is about experience, and it is open ended. Art makes for the greatest excuse to stare at each other: it gives us a chance to glimpse inside someone else's heart in the hopes that that will offer us a little purchase on our own hearts.

Talking about hard feelings can be uncomfortable but the biggest risk taken by sharing is not humiliation. It’s connection. You never know whose life you could inspire: “Your work could turn on a light for someone stuck in a room they didn’t know was dark. Or, at the very least, crack open a window.” That is the power of sharing art and what keeps my heart beating.

It is as close as I can get to taking you by the hand and bringing you on the ferry to go to the island full of wild bunnies where I come from. Lately, I’m becoming less interested in realism and more interested in the expression of movement and the aliveness I feel when I’m at the easel.  More than anything, I’m here to tell my own story and break down the stigma around mental illness.  This is me, turning myself inside out sharing the creatures that have wandered around my heart and mind my whole life.