Born of Fluid and Flame #3 Painting

I didn’t grow up dreaming of being a painter, but I was always an artist. I spent my first several decades working in theater (as actor, director and stage hand), running a performing arts center, signing with Top International Modeling Agency Wilhelmina Models and living between stages, studios, and photo sets. My college roommate was a painter who gave me the opportunity to play with paint—occasional nights spent listening to Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Annie Lennox, Nine Inch Nails, and experimenting with color and line in the margins of our lives. I made art as something I sporadically returned to every so often like a secret ritual, while my main focus was in theatre. I followed my academic passions into a doctorate in Performance Studies. I studied embodiment, theatre history, feminist theory, abjection. I planned to teach, to stay in that world of rigorous thought. But after years of adjuncting, I felt called to make, to use my hands again the way I did when building sets for the theatre. When my husband gifted me an easel in 2018, I picked up a brush, not with a plan, but with quiet urgency. I began painting every day, instead of sporadic random evenings. It gave me something nothing else could: a way to feel deeply without needing to explain. A quiet connection. A kind of healing. Since then, my studio practice has taken root and flourished. I’ve exhibited across the U.S., sold original work across the US and internationally, and shared my process through press features in print, television, and online. My work lives in private collections across the world. Though my creative path has crossed disciplines and geographies—from Texas to Washington, North Carolina to California—each chapter has given me a deeper understanding of presence, energy, and place. Painting is where all of it comes home. I’m Redin Winter, a visual artist based in San Diego, California. I came to the canvas through the long corridor of artistic mediums, and I stay for the unspoken. For the felt but unnameable. For the connection between artist and viewer, movement and stillness, body and breath. Each painting is a threshold. You're invited in.