Under the radar
Patricia Moss-Vreeland
Patricia Moss-Vreeland launched her career producing that most traditional of genres—still life. After pursuing studies at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, and the Philadelphia College of Art, she ended up in Rome as part of Tyler School of Art’s program...
Jerry McLaughlin
Though he grew up poor in a part of rural southern Ohio that falls within the cultural swath known as Appalachia, Jerry McLaughlin was a precocious kid who learned to learned to read at the age of 18 months. A few years later, after his mother bought a set of the...
Peter Roux
Peter Roux believes an attraction to landscape, one of the principal motifs in his work, may stem from the many upheavals of his childhood. His father was a career marine and for the first 12 years of his life the family moved on average once a year. “I think I was...
Jodi Colella
Though she is often categorized as a fiber artist, Jodi Colella works with all manner of materials that extend the boundaries of what we think of as sculpture. These have included aluminum screening, found driftwood and gnarly twigs, plastic sleeves for newspapers,...
Andrew Lyght
Though it may not be immediately apparent in his elegant abstractions in many different mediums, Andrew Lyght’s works are infused with memories of his boyhood in Guyana, a small multicultural country on South America’s northern coast. The only child of a single mother...
Mokha Laget
What Mokha Laget recalls best about her childhood in Algeria—and what has stayed with her throughout her career as an artist—is the quality of the light in North Africa. The daughter of a French diplomat, she spent the first six years of her life in the former colony...
Lee Albert Hill
Lee Albert Hill grew up in Midland, TX, at a time of huge changes to the landscape and the economy as oil and gas discoveries transformed the small city in West Texas into a booming oil patch. His father, a geophysicist, was “out on the land a lot,” says Hill, who...
Tracy Linder
It’s hard to imagine an artist more authentically “Western” than Tracy Linder. She grew up on a family farm not far from where she lives now in Billings, Montana. As a girl, she participated in all aspects of life lived close to the land—harvesting, irrigating, and...
Tamar Zinn
Tamar Zinn was about twelve when she discovered the thrill of drawing. Like many artistically inclined New York City kids, she took classes at the Art Students League on West 57th Street. “There was an enormous studio divided into two sections,” she recalls. “In one...
Tm Gratkowski
As a kid growing up in Chicago, Tm Gratkowski believed he was destined to become a hockey player. “I was on skates at age three and playing hockey by the time I was five,” he says. “We grew up on the lake, and I would put on my skates at the house and walk down to the...
Paula Roland
Though she now lives in Santa Fe, at a safe remove from severe tropical storms, Paula Roland knows a thing or two about hurricanes. “All my life it was ‘Hurricane’s coming! School’s out!’” she recalls of her childhood in Biloxi, MS. “You cover the windows, pile up the...
Donald Martiny
Donald Martiny’s earliest memory of being mesmerized by paint comes from kindergarten, when he lived in Schenectady, NY, and had “a teacher who was really stingy about art supplies,” he recalls. “She would give us only two jars of poster paint, and I remember being...
Photo credit: Joe Fig Self Portrait: Collinsville, 12 ½” x 31 ½” x 21”, Mixed Media, 2013. Courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery