Tanya Edmonds

I am a creative spirit, who loves to express myself through many different mediums. My art falls into two categories but is is always a celebration of the human experience and the natural world, particularly botanical. I love all things tropical, botanical, oceanic and historical. Humour, and interaction with the natural world is infused in everything I do.

One body of work focuses on botanical subjects and I use my photos and encaustic medium in their treatment. I have been taking tree and plant "portraits" for the past 5 years and try to capture each tree or plant's unique personality in my pieces. I work with encaustic medium, and also manipulate and enhance photos by experimenting with various types of paper, pushed colours and contrasts, and play with layering inks, oil pigments, organic or found objects, graphite, charcoal, watercolours, pencil....anything that inspires in the moment actually. I am moved by the intrinsic stillness of the photography of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The finished work has a distressed patina and evokes a strong sense of time and place, while at the same time, creating an "otherworldly" quality, always with the subject standing out strong against the backdrop. It's as if the man-made wor...

Although no formal education, I enjoyed a brief stint studying textile design at the Chelsea College of Art, before running out to Los Angeles from the UK and the burgeoning music video industry in 1986, as a set painter, set decorator, and then Art Director in film and music video production at the beginning of my vocational life. ( Among countless other music videos, I art directed Nirvana's "Smell's Like Teen Spirit". ) Fun facts to know and tell! Lots of fantastic memories and stories from those days! I left the industry when I wanted to have children. In this time I moved into the healing arts, but also continued to express myself by designing gardens, building furniture, renovating homes and painting trompe l'oeil for private commissions. Soon to be an empty nester, I am back at the joy of simply just creating through the visual arts.