Kelly Trujillo

I attended art school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied painting before transferring to the University of New Mexico to work on a minor in Philosophy. These combined disciplines have help me to express ideas and images that have consumed me since childhood.

I have done a great deal of traveling and have lived many places including Chicago, Boston, Seattle, New Orleans, Portland and Dublin, Ireland. Each painting is based in a place where I have experienced a connection to temporal beauty and transcendent possibilities. Since arriving in California I've been overwhelmed by the natural beauty and diversity of landscape from the rich and verdant natural coast to the austere beauty of the high desert.

“When I attempted a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light… For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can, no one cares. Now, a scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in the universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, the bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality is part of our inconsolable secret.” -C.S. Lewis

"We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness." -Thich Nhat Hanh