My name is Amelia Plata Ramos. I am an multimedia artist and arts educator and hold a California single-subject credential and a bachelor’s in fine arts with a concentration in drawing & painting from California State University in Long Beach.

THE JOURNEY

From the earliest memories through my years in high school, I had a sense that being creative was an attribute to my persona as ketchup packets are to a burger combo. It’s nice to have them if you like ketchup, but your combo is still good if there are none. Even in college, when I was convinced that all I wanted to do in life was to paint and learn about art, my choice of studies seemed as remedial because I couldn’t or wouldn’t choose any other major. As I became a parent, worker and homemaker, my oil paints and canvases were stashed away in the farthest corner of my garage to make way for my new life.

Even though I did not reach for those oil paint tubes, I now look back and see that I never stopped creating.

As a child, cutting paper and building dirt roads were a great alternative to watching T.V. In high school, designing and publishing a thin xeroxed booklet of the Chicas Locas unofficial school club solidified a sense of belonging that the yearbook staff would never see or immortalize. It is true that I would nor could choose a college degree that didn’t have do do with art, and I am gratefully happy for my Art diploma because it confirmed that it is a serious and necessary matter. So necessary that I resolved that I would become a college art teacher. As life is creative in its own right, I fell in love and married right after college. Literally, the day after my commencement ceremony.

The new found joy and excitement of being a mom expanded my notion of what it means to co-create and form a young mind. In my case, five.

ONE OF MANY

While I put teaching aside to pursue a different career, life ushered me through the most amazing learning lab I have ever experienced. As a mom, it was now my turn to speak life-defining words to a new human being. The daunting responsibility of expressing to my children that they are enough just because they exist led me to realize how important it was for me to help them experience freedom and creativity. They know that being creative is one of many dimensions of their humanity, and they cannot exist outside of it. For them, it is the patty in a burger combo, their major of choice in school, and their creative instruments and tools live freely in their room, throughout our home and, yes, in the garage.

NEXT CHAPTER

Being a mom has convinced me of how crucial it is for young people to embrace their creative dimension, especially through their adolescent years. I went back to school to earn an art teaching credential (K-12) and I look forward to helping young minds discover who they truly are. My art supplies are now acrylic paint, printmaking sets, pastels, watercolors, and other media that I explore as I am learning how to teach.

ARTIST STATEMENT

John Singer Sargent’s works have been an inspiration because of his sensitivity to light, shadow, color, and the simplicity of his compositions capture the essence of what the process of painting is for me. I am interested in light as a metaphor for hope amid despair. I was taught and influenced by artists who drew inspiration from artists such as El Greco, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Monet and Thiebaud among many others, and their guidance shaped the way I learned to manipulate mediums to capture subjects and objects as they were revealed by the light surrounding them. I hope to continue learning and developing this process as well as other ways of art expression.

Light has become a constant theme in my experience as an artist and as a human being, and I intend to explore how it shows us beauty and exposes the darker side of life. I hope to create pieces that invite the viewer to a dialogue that explores what light conveys both as a technique and as a narrative. In my own life journey, light has shaped me in its presence and absence. I consider myself lucky to have learned so much as an art student before life took me on a long and deep path in life, and I intend to use that knowledge as a theme to express how I perceive the world. I also consider myself lucky for having had those experiences over the past twenty-five years, as they will inform and shape my art as continue to grow as an artist.