Debora Ratliff
Santa Fe, NM
Time and Tempo
Acrylic+Mixed media
24" x 24"
2023
$750
About
I grew up in Texas cities. As a child, my favorite thing was visiting my great grandparents’ ranch on the Pecos River in west Texas, the beginning of my love of the outdoors, open spaces, desert beauty, nature, geology, and high blue skies. After a career as a trial lawyer, I retired and followed that early love and moved to Santa Fe. Since then, I have traveled a lot of the Southwest and some of the world, pursued interests like cooking, hiking, fly fishing, and river running, and learned new skills like playing the ukulele and, most wonderfully, making art. With a longtime love of art, but with no experience or education in art making, I began at the beginning with a basic drawing course at Santa Fe Community College, followed by many more art classes, in person and online—learning materials, skills, theory, technique. After many years and many stops and starts, I have recently found my own path and begun making art that is all mine and that I like. I am indeed an emerging artist, having first shown my work in late 2023.
Artist Statement
In my work as a trial lawyer, my business was telling stories, stories with a beginning, middle, and end, and an intended outcome, constrained by the facts of someone else’s experience. Now, as a painter, my stories unfold on no particular path, with no planned outcome, in the subjects, colors, shapes, textures, and layers of my mixed media paintings, using acrylics, collage, and mark-making tools. Although I am inspired by the work of other artists and by the history, culture, colors, landscapes, and For me, making art has become an unguided meditation, in which I add layer upon layer, paint over, add marks, make changes, and then excavate the layers to find the painting, with no plan to get there or idea of where it will end up. My stories are in the paintings, and hopefully others may find parts of their stories in them, too.
