About Aleta Jacobson Artist, Designer, Instructor Aleta Jacobson is an award-winning collage, watercolor, 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 Bromxmer, Robert Burridge, and Chris Cozen. Aleta is now a working artist, teacher, and designer who specializes in creating powerful collage, mixed media, and watercolor paintings using a variety of tools and materials, including art tissues that she stains by hand. Aleta aims to find the beauty and creativity in everyday ephemera, incorporating found objects in her collages. She enjoys using these materials to emphasize the beauty in the everyday. Aleta is inspired by nature and the environment and focuses her watercolor paintings on botanical illustrations and landscapes. Her work is abstract in nature, but she still seeks to allow the viewer’s imagination to find familiar images and themes. She creates her work using the same basic design principles and structure that artists have traditionally used. Each piece typically evolves from a thought, a vision, a memory, or a photograph of nature that moves her. She counts many of the great 20th-century collage, mixed media artists, and painters, such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Robert Motherwell, Nathan Oliveira, Richard Diebenkorn, Kurt Schwitters, and Raymond Saunders as influential and inspirational to her work. Aleta demonstrates throughout Southern California, teaches art lessons and group classes. While Aleta is passionate about teaching art at any age, she finds particular satisfaction in teaching children the fundamentals of art, for their unbridled creativity and eagerness to learn. Further, she is a firm believer in the educational enrichment of an arts education in fostering creative problem solving and higher order thinking. In educating student artists of all ages, 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. Featured In Incite from Northlight Books Click the image to buy your copy! Publications Click the image to buy your copy!
