Painter Nina Tichava, raised in both rural northern New Mexico and the Bay Area in California, was influenced by her father, a construction worker and mathematician, and by her mother, an artist and designer. Tichava received her BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco and Oakland. She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Tichava is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award Grant in 2007 and has exhibited professionally since 2009. Tichava’s work is featured in numerous private, corporate and public collections and has been exhibited in major national art fairs including Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, Seattle and San Francisco. With an upcoming show at the Masur Museum, Monroe, Louisiana, her paintings have also been exhibited at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Marin Museum Of Contemporary Art, Novato, California; University of Science and Arts Museum, Chickasha, Oklahoma; Museum of the Red River, Idabel, Oklahoma; and Charles B. Goddard Center, Ardmore, Oklahoma. Reflections of the dualities in her upbringing — from country to city, pragmatist to artist, nature to technology — are essential to and evident in her paintings. Pulling imagery and motifs from organic form, architecture, media and design, she creates densely layered, mixed-media paintings that are invested in experimentation and grounded in traditional painting and craft. Tichava is interested in the overlap of nature and culture and the patterns present in both, as well as the color and spatial relationships that develop through process. Her work is best described as abstract painting with botanical and architectural references, as the pieces suggest natural forms (birds, leaves, branches), manufactured structures (buildings, windows, lights) and patterning, both natural and designed (woven fabrics, strata of earth, pixels). Using painting and printmaking techniques, she interweaves drawing and collage with a variety of media. Simultaneously painterly and constrained, her paintings are composed of complex layers, many of which are over-painted and concealed. A prominent element of her work is the application of thousands of beads of paint, painstakingly and individually applied with a brush and used to create screens and patterns. Tichava defines her paintings as visual collections of moments from daily life: combined glimpses, thoughts, memories and objects. As objects, they embody her emotional response to things mass produced and idealized. As handmade pieces, they are individual, imprecise and therefore unique. She strives to depict not only what things look like through the filter of her personal perspective, but also to create a sense of how they might feel. She designates her works as emotional and imperfect, and that unattainability of perfection is what continues to engage Tichava in her painting. Recent media coverage includes Art Dose Magazine, 805 Art + Lit, The Café Review, Art Bound Podcast and an upcoming full-length feature in LandEscape Magazine, United Kingdom.