Portrait of an Artist: Tina Mion
This is a continuing series of interviews with the forty-eight artists whose work was selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opened on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014.
Tina Mion created the work Pinata for the 2013 competition.
Q: Where are you from, where do you live now?
A: I was born in Washington, D.C. I grew up in a lot of places. I live in Winslow, Arizona.
Q: What medium(s) do you work with?
I work in oil paint, pastels, acrylic, and watercolor.
Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.
A: My work ranges from tiny pastels to enormous oils. I decide what I need to say and that dictates the size, style, and medium I use.
Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.), and how does it contribute to your art?
A: When I was twelve, I hung around Nelson Shanks’s house; he was the first artist I’d ever met; although my father was an artist, I did not know him. I apprenticed with Sidney Willis in my teens. He bought me my first easel and gave me scraps of linen and tubes of paint he didn’t need.
I also spent a lot of time in the D.C. museums, including the National Portrait Gallery. I went to Paier College of art after high school but dropped out after two years and moved to Sri Lanka.
Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?
I was in the first Outwin Boochever Competition in 2006, and I was a featured artist in “Portraiture Now” in 2007.
Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.
I painted myself as a piñata in response to some difficult health issues. The objects falling out of me represent events and elements I am made of. This painting was my way of working through my fear and pain.
Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.
A: All my work has something to say. I paint because I am curious, and painting gives me an excuse to research and contemplate an idea, be it serious or lighthearted—or many times both. I use a lot of dark humor.
Q: What are you currently working on?
A: Nothing. Last year to celebrate feeling great I painted an 8 x 22-foot pentaptych called Carry Us All; it is about coexistence. The day I finished I was standing on a chair adjusting lights for my very first viewing and I fell backward—or, more to the point, the chair had wheels and it rolled out from under me. In Piñata one of the only things I left unbroken is my right hand now, sadly, that is broken. I now have twelve weeks to contemplate how I will never stand on anything with wheels.
Q: How has your work changed over time?
A: It has become more personal.
Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had has an artist.
A: On April Fools’ Day 1997, my husband and I moved into La Posada, the long-abandoned Fred Harvey Hotel in the remote desert town of Winslow, Arizona. La Posada is the masterpiece of Mary Colter, America’s most important woman architect. We moved to Winslow to restore La Posada and to save this remarkable building from bulldozers. Today people come to visit from all over the world. We are working with several world-class artists to revitalize Winslow into an art mecca like Marfa but easier to get to.
Q: Who is your favorite artist?
A: That is a hard question because first there are my friends Ed Ruscha, James Turrell, Joe Goode, Dan Lutzick, and Billy Al Bengston, whose work, humor, and intelligence I respect to the point of probably running into a burning building to save them. Then there is Mary Colter, the cantankerous architect I never met but whose work I live in and moved to Winslow to help save. Finally there are the dead boys—Goya, Grosz, Velzqáuez, Van Der Weyden—who look over my shoulder as I work.
Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?
A: The first cave painter.
Q: What is your favorite artwork?
A: The Feast in the House of Levi, by Paolo Veronese; it is grand in scale yet full of humor and a little subversive.
