Resides: South Bend, IN

"Maria Tomasula came of age as an artist during the heyday of anti-aestheticism, but she refused to allow that philosophy to smother her natural love of the world of the sense. Drawing on her personal history as the child of Mexican immigrants, she embraced the bleeding hearts, dancing skeletons, and rose-encrusted Madonnas of Mexican folk art, motifs born of a marriage of native-Mexican and Spanish-colonial traditions. Her art shares the exuberant excess of these models, while reshaping such familiar motifs into meditations on the spiritual energies embedded in the material world.

Her paintings present arrangements of flowers, skulls, butterflies, jewels, birds and human hearts painted with such fidelity to nature that they assume an almost hallucinogenic quality. Deliberately eschewing visible brushwork, Tomasula presents unblemished surfaces through which viewers may glimpse, as if in a mirror or through the still surface of a lake, masses of meticulously realized emblems of natural and man-made abundance. Light glances off these objects in a way that emphasizes their dimensionality, while the colors are as rich and seductive as the bluest sky or the ripest plum."

--Eleanor Heartney, December, 2007