Representing Thalia
Stratton
Upon graduating with Honors from
the Academy of Art University of San Francisco with a cooperative
degree in Fashion Illustration, Thalia Stratton owned and operated
her own design studio from 1990.
She landed her first teaching job around the same time she graduated
and is still teaching part-time at San Francisco State University.
After free-lancing in the advertising
world for many years, including working for clients such as,
Givenchy-Paris, Neiman Marcus, I. Magnin andCo., Playboy Enterprises
and the San Francisco Ballet, she also produced product lines
for the Gift Market and the Wine industry of Napa and Sonoma
Valley.
In the late nineties, Thalia
decided to approach the Fine Art market and began selling her
illustrations and paintings to small galleries and local art
collectors. She is currently a member of several prestigious
Pastel Societies and the Oil Painters of America. She has
been published in numerous publications including, Gentry Magazine,
The San Francisco Chronicle, and American Art Collector.
She has won many awards, including the LGAA Curators Award
2009.
Trained as an illustrator, she is naturally drawn to narrative
and to using her work to suggest a story.
Her process begins as recording a specific moment at a specific
place, and then transforming it into a fictional scene in order
to create a powerful and distinct mood. Thalias approach
to color and light is in the forefront of her style, and is the
main contribution to this transformation into mood: a limited
palette of muted, sophisticated darks, minimal intensity, subtle
values, along with the clarity of white to indicate how light
plays off forms and seems to intensify darkness.
Thalia wants viewers to feel so welcomed into the scene that
they can create their own story of sense of place, and even imagined
memories of what may have happened then and there.
Whether indicating backlighting or the warm soft glow of a quiet
interior, tracing fleeting streams of light to achieve a dramatic
effect, Thalia strives for a timeless transformation from the
everyday moment.
Thalia creates a window into
a visual dialogue with the viewers boundless imagination.
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