Artist’s BIOGRAPHY:
Ms Caya’s drawings started at the age of three, and through a childhood at home in the woodlands of Western NY, inspired by Irish legends and Native mythos - influenced by Brazilian visionary artist Susan Seddon Boulet and prolific English illustrator Alan Lee - she developed a Venn diagram of passions, a nerd-sense for Story, & a creative vocabulary that still informs her work today.
She earned her BFA in Illustration at Pennsylvania College of Art & Design in Lancaster, PA, mentored under award-winning fantasy illustrator Gary Lippincott, worked with traditional painting master Ken Laager, and is published in the International Art Book "Infected By Art", Vol. 4, and Vol. 7.
Ms Caya currently lives with her partner, kid, and feline studio assistant, south of the Appalachian Trail, in Pennsylvania.
{updated} STATEMENT from the Artist:
Hi - I'm Mairin-Taj Caya.
Irish wisdom reminds us that we are always more willing to accept Truth when it is accompanied by Story, and this, I feel, is the pathos of the visual arts; to reintroduce truths to us through creative conviction.
I took to drawing from imagination like a duck to water at the age of three, and haven’t looked back since, although my journey to professional artistry meandered through other interests and paths of study. I've been the dancer, the wilderness guide, the student, the model muse, the tutor, the designer, the gardener, the nomad... All this and more. It always comes back to the art - the beautiful story within, waiting to be recalled to us anew. So I’ve come to believe strongly that well-rounded experience in life cultivates an ever-spring of creativity.
I also believe that beauty not only brings pleasure, but powerful therapy: communication, healing, inspiration, invention, and resolution, an ever-relevant inheritance for the human spirit.
My art today utilizes essence and allegory to allude to the thread of truth and beauty that is ever-present in life. In my portraiture work, this connects technical likeness with the idea of interpretation, chasing an essence through intentional play. In my personal work, essence and allegory function through my own visual vocabulary to compose layers of archetypal storytelling underneath a contemporary, femme perspective, with traditional figurative structure. And in my life studies, I’m forever smitten with the raw Truth and Beauty resonating from Nature, which I have come to experience as the bottom line, our collective birth right, our eternity. Chasing this in medium on paper gives me peace, like a meditation.
What I see as the irrevocable bond between humanity and the wild-origin-realm inspires my work as an artist. It is a life-long vocation, but one I have been devoted to through thick and thin. Nature brings us back to ourselves, always; art is how we synthesize and transcribe that relationship. The Truth and the Story, through Beauty.
-with gratitude
mc
