Aleta Jacobson is an award-winning collage, acrylic and mixed media artist living and working in Southern California. Aleta’s love for artistic expression developed at an early age. The child of a highly creative family, Aleta’s earliest tools were crayons and her brother’s art books. As a student, Aleta leaned more toward artistic pursuits, often skipping other classes to hang out in her art teacher’s room and do art.

Aleta studied art at Riverside City College, Citrus Community College, and California Polytechnic University at Pomona. Before college, she studied art in Europe for two months. She began creating commissioned art in the 1970’s for friends and loved ones. In addition, she has studied under artists such as Skip Lawrence, Christopher Schinks, Sylvia Megerdichian, Gerald Brommer, Robert Burridge, and Chris Cozen. Aleta is now a working artist, teacher, and designer who specializes in creating powerful collage, mixed media, and acrylic paintings using a variety of tools and materials, including art tissues that she stains by hand. In addition, Aleta creates and sells beautiful jewelry with found objects, beads, crystals, and hand made metal pieces. In her art and designs, Aleta aims to find the beauty and creativity in everyday objects, incorporating mostly found objects and cast-off bits of material in her work. She enjoys reusing materials to emphasize the beauty in the everyday and breath new life into pieces others have discarded.

Aleta is inspired by life events, current events, and the environment. While her work is predominantly abstract in nature, she still seeks to allow the viewer’s imagination to find familiar images and themes.  She creates her work using the same basic design principals and structure that collage artists have traditionally used. Each piece typically evolves from a thought, a vision, a memory, a photograph or a scrap that moves her. She counts many of the great 20th Century Collage and Mixed Media artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Robert Motherwell, Nathan Oliveira, Richard Diebenkorn, Kurt Schwitters, and Raymond Saunders as influential and inspirational to her work.

She also teaches classes at her studio in Upland, California where she delights in spreading the word of creativity to her students, inspiring even the most novice to create masterful works of art, themselves. In this way, she can give back to her community, using art to bring individuals together in shared experience, and bringing artists together to share and talk about art. Aleta believes that the key to improvement in the arts is creating every day and communing and sharing with other artists, rather than confining creativity to a solitary space.

Aleta’s work has been exhibited in shows, local galleries and various collections nationally since 2000. Most recently, Aleta’s work hangs on the walls of the newly refurbished City of Riverside convention center. She has also been published in North Light Books’ Incite: Dreams Realized and their second edition, Incite 2: Color Passions. You can see more of her work at the 511 Art Studio in Upland, California as well as various other shows and galleries around the Inland Empire. Email info.511artstudio@gmail.com for more details.