Sumari I Painting

In my mid-teens, I began classical art training with Paul Coze, a French painter, public art sculptor and muralist, anthropologist, and French authority on Native Americans. I became his apprentice and worked for him intermittently for ten years. In my early 20s, I studied sculpture and painting at Arizona State University and traveled to Mexico to attend art school at the University of the Americas. When I returned to the states, I continued my art studies at California Institute of the Arts. My first solo show was at the Myrna Loy Art Center in Helena, Montana. My work has been exhibited at the Holter Museum in Helena, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, The Women’s Building in Los Angeles, Antioch University Los Angeles, Highways Performing Arts Theatre in Santa Monica, and Los Angeles City Hall. In addition to Paul Coze, my early influences were Chagall, Kandinsky, De Kooning, O’Keefe, Picasso and Tamayo. I work in acrylic and oil paint, charcoal, pastel, collage and mixed media. Artist Statement Having grown up, mostly in Arizona, there is an undeniable, sometimes unconscious, southwest sensibility that seeps into my work. I feel there is a beauty in the barren dryness of the desert. The landscape and the people can be strange and stubborn, like the odd-shaped saguaro cacti that seem to grow strictly out of an insistence to be alive, or the tenacious weeds that push through cracked earth, desert floors, rocks and the Indian caves I saw as a teenager on the many trips I took with my art teacher to the Hopi and Navajo reservations. A strong, southwest influence, mixed with my extensive background as a writer, dancer, and practitioner of body and movement therapies, emotional release and energy work, come together through shape and color in surprising and unexpected ways as I work to make new fusions of perfected form that speak back to me.