Artist Profile: Debra Stuckgold

Bay Area native Debra Stuckgold began making art with her mother while in high school. She pursued an art education and got her Masters Degree in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University. 

More than twenty years later, Stuckgold is still creating art. She lives in Berkeley and teaches art at an Oakland elementary school. Even her travels are artistically motivated. Thanks to a grant from the Marcus Education Fund, Stuckgold is headed to Costa Rica this summer to study the connections between art and ecology.

She presently uses mixed media, beeswax, acrylic paint, ink, cold wax, powdered pigments, graphite and screen printing. Her current project involves painting birds on blueprints, using mylar paper and silkscreenings to create layers of transparency. She was inspired by her residency in Costa Rica where she worked with blueprints and maps. “I began looking at the relationship between nature and urban life.”

The project also has a 3-dimensional element. Stuckgold is building birds out of bees wax.  The birds  will be suspended with lights to cast shadows. They are meant to represent how nature is being degradated.

Stuckgold incorporates layers of Islamic textile prints into her work, inspired by a trip Spain where she visited old mosques. “I came back mesmerized,” admits Stuckgold. She researched the meanings of the the patterns. “The repetition is a way of working with something divine,” says Stuckgold.

This weekend visitors will be the first to see Stuckgold's new project in her Arsenal studio.

Open Studios location: Lincoln Street Studios #981