About the Artist:
Allison Turcios is a Houston based mixed-media artist specializing in printmaking and painting. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Houston Christian University and is presently a Master of Fine Arts Candidate at HCU, studying under the renowned artist Michael Roque Collins. Since Allison was a little girl, her favorite way to express herself was through drawing and painting pictures to communicate her inner world. From illustrating made up books to painting flowers with Crayola watercolors, she was always destined to create. At 11 years old, she had a chance encounter with someone from church who called out her creative gift and nurtured it. From that moment on she has relentlessly pursued and invested in her art career.
While obtaining her BFA, she studied oil painting and placed various animals inside dreamy worlds full of color. Although these works allowed her to master oil painting, she found herself desiring more from the creative process. Once in her MFA program, she abandoned her heavy illustrative renderings and embraced abstraction, using layers and texture to develop the imagery. Her current work focuses on exploring life and death in a personal context viewed through a spiritual lens. She does this by using nature to communicate introspective ideas about seasons of hurt, death, sewing, growing, blooming, reaping and everything in between; often using biblical themes to draw parallels to her own experiences. Most of her visual content is heavily inspired by her great grandparents' home where they kept a vast garden filled with plants, flowers and various yard trinkets.
Allison is an artist devoted to her developing body of work and being in the studio as much as possible. She is soaking up all that her MFA program has to offer and enjoying being under the mentorship of the talented HCU faculty until she graduates in May 2024. She is a loving wife and dog-mom who is newly married to her best friend and love, Kevin. They often work in tandem together as he is a creative too, owning a visual media company called The Creative Table.
Artist Statement:
Recently, my time in the studio has been dedicated to creating dreamlike visions and abstractions of the natural world that interact with the dichotomy of life and death. These works are made using printmaking methods combined with mixed-media elements and sometimes feature sculptural adornments. I choose my subjects by using photography of my interactions with nature and specific references related to the story unfolding; the composition is built by transferring these images in gel-medium to the panel. Expressive and intentional marks in pen allow the imagery to emerge from the distorted transfers. This sets the framework for the surface to become immersed in texture media and washes of acrylic and ink, then unified through painted layers of handmade paper.
The textured and layered process hints at the depth and complexity of my life, while the references to nature help to draw a parallel to spiritual revelation and transformation. Through the symbolism associated with a specific flower, the energy within a brush stroke, or the emotion of colliding colors, these are the facets that aid in the composition of a visual story. This story illustrates the experience of rebirth after seasons of sorrow and death. It is often expressed through my work in flourishing gardens juxtaposed with scenes of barren silhouetted trees. The intent behind each creation is that it displays the spiritual being unveiled through the natural, conveying how the relationship between the two reflects my experiences with faith.