What intrigues me is the mystical; in life and art. Choosing the path of an artist almost forty years ago was the beginning of a relationship with creativity and all its mystic qualities, adventuring wherever it leads me; thus I’m an artist working in two disciplines; I’m a painter and an author. It’s in the seeking and developing of this connection that is my compass, to follow my heart and embrace challenges — such as in painting; moving from abstracts to landscapes to figures and back to abstracts, or in writing a new novel. It's my devotion to painting as an art form that necessitates experimentation, working in various styles — like Gerhard Richter — I'm an abstract and figurative painter.
Currently, I’m part of an interdisciplinary art collab project with two brilliant composers; Cornelius Dufallo and Guy Barash. Continuing from where Kandinsky and Schoenberg left off, we’re breaking down the barriers between disciplines into an innovative sphere where we experiment with the interplay between music and art, blurring the lines.
Interpreting sounds into visuals, brushstrokes flow like dancing, moving through the space of the canvas, the choreography. Each color, its form and line, dancing in response to each other, evoking the mental, emotional and spiritual states I feel while listening. Each medium, the highest intensity of color in; ink, acrylic, oil, watercolor and gold leaf, brings their distinctive quality and whether translucent or opaque, matte or iridescent, changes in relation to each other. Violin has the quality of the human voice, summoning passion, sorrow, suffering and love; the spectrum of the human condition. The Minutes reflect the experimental, abstract quality of my paintings. Together, unable to label what you’re hearing or seeing, you can only experience, connecting to your inner self; my paintings aim to speak to one’s spirit.
A teen in NYC in the 80's, Vezna began to seriously paint after a knee injury derailed her plans of becoming a professional ballerina. Her first paid job at age seven in ’79 was dancing with the Joffrey and Nureyev in Petrushka at the Mark Hellinger Theatre. She worked for diverse artists and artisans in NYC, including Serpentine Studio; a decorative painting studio in Tribeca formed by three artists who were painters. Throughout the 80's, she runway modeled for the fashion designer Betsey Johnson, her last gig an appearance on Club MTV.
Self-portrait at RISD's Summer Program, 1987
Trading in pointe shoes for a skateboard, and ballet for the mosh pit at CBGB’s, Vezna shaved her head, bleached it, and began dying it various colors — the first of which was lilac. A regular at Sunday matinees at CB’s (where the Ramones and the Cro-Mags often played) inspired by NYC’s emerging hardcore and post-punk scene from age twelve, she skateboarded all over the East Village postering up Xerox prints of her art onto street-lamp posts. She picked up guitar, but even after filling a notebook with poems for song lyrics, her immersion in the visual fine arts usurped forming a band.
At Dalton High School, she studied life-drawing and painting with Aaron Kurzen, who’d studied with Cameron Booth and Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League of New York in the 40’s. Kurzen taught her the methods of Hans Hofmann and Henri Matisse. She studied photography at RISD’s Summer Program, life-drawing and painting at the School of Visual Arts, and attended life-drawing sessions at Spring Studios in SoHo throughout high school. Vezna applied to RISD a year early, ranked among the top five applicants accepted, and received a scholarship.
Life-drawing from Aaron Kurzen's class in high school, 1988
At RISD she majored in film and minored in painting, graduating in 1992 with a BFA in Film/Video. Her senior film, which won the Student Academy Award for Best Experimental Film on the East Coast, launched a career directing music videos, signed by Shelter Films, then Automatic Productions in NYC. When a TV campaign she wrote and directed for Nickelodeon’s new network Nick at Nite won awards and a rave New York Times review, advertising agencies took note and her commercial directing career bloomed. She signed with Voyeur Films, where she went on to direct award-winning commercials for Miller Lite, Sprite and the like.
Discovering in her late twenties that her true purpose as an artist lay beyond creating television commercials, she returned to her roots in painting, venturing into non-figurative work for the first time. A move to Los Angeles led to representation with George Billis Gallery LA, and Lauren Clark Fine Arts on the East Coast. After a transformative trip to Africa in 2008 and beginning her sixteen-year studies in shamanic healing, in love with her soon-to-be-husband Toby, surfing and California, Vezna was inspired to paint landscapes. The birth of their son, Jack, in 2011 moved her to explore figurative work; a series of “parent and child paintings.”
Impacted by the death of her father, who had always seen the writer in Vezna, she began work on a novel, while painting in her studio and caring for her young son. Her debut novel One with the Waves was published by Santa Monica Press in May of 2023 and received a rave Kirkus review. During the COVID pandemic, she circled back to abstracts, and sparked by receiving large commissions, she began painting large-scale abstracts on wall-sized canvases.
Painting at RISD, 1990, photo by Saskia Jell
Vezna’s paintings have exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Sales Gallery, The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, the Bolinas Museum, and in galleries and shows across the US. Her work is collected globally. Vezna is also a featured artist in Create Perfect Paintings; An Artist's Guide to Visual Thinking. She lives in Manhattan Beach, California, with her family.
Vezna and Toby in front of Vezna's landscapes at Along the Coast, Terrence Rogers Fine Art, 2008
Now that her son is thirteen, she’s excited to wholly embark on adventures in art and literature. Currently she’s working on a new novel and a series of 44 abstract paintings on paper using ink, paint, pencil and gold leaf — in a new kind of interdisciplinary artist collaboration with two brilliant composers; Cornelius Dufallo and Guy Barash. They plan to exhibit their 44 “minutes” together in an immersive gallery show, where the minutes can be listened to with headphones on an app, or performed live in person, while viewing the paintings.
Vezna and son, Jack , 2018,
photo by Kara Coleen