“Tiffany Bozic is a California artist who explores the natural world through her own metaphoric lens. Using fine attention to detail and the accuracy of Audubon, she makes paintings of exquisite beauty and rich meaning. As we begin to come to grips with what we have wrought of this Earth, her pictures place us squarely IN nature, very much part of it, not apart from it. Her animals are us, we are them. Bozic jokes that she was “raised by goats”, and that is not far from the truth: her youth was spent running wild on a farm in Arkansas, and later rural Ohio. Now traveling worldwide with her daughter and ornithologist husband, she continues to expand her vision of what nature is, from gory to glory, from the minute to the mighty. Painting on sustainably harvested maple panels with thinned acrylics, she allows the wood’s grain to inform her celebratory compositions. Each piece requires but a few tablespoons of acrylic medium and pigments to execute, keeping her own ecological footprint small. For two decades, on both coasts, through many solo and group exhibits and two fine books with Gingko Press, Drawn By Instinct (2012) and Unnatural Selections (2019), Tiffany Bozic’s work has shown a continual light on how we need to treat each other, other species, and our planet itself.”
Mission
My work celebrates the diversity of the natural world and addresses our cultural (dis)connection from it. Artists play a vital role as cultural instigators to challenge conventions and help the collective culture reprioritize what we value. Through my art, I want to draw attention to the beauty of our fragile planet. I hope to arouse a desire to feel intimately connected to nature and motivate people to take action to help protect and save it.
I use my art to create a universal language – a way to communicate with texture, light, color, and forms – that people of any gender, ethnicity or age can relate to. My aim is to engage, educate and simply entrance the eye and feed the soul.
I consider myself a storyteller first, creating accessible emotional allegories like timeless children’s fables. In my paintings I explore ecological narratives to heal our complicated relationships with ourselves and each other. By highlighting our shared commonalities such as the universal struggle for survival, the life cycle, love and loss, bonding, motherhood and collective consciousness I try to eliminate the feeling of separateness from other people and animals. My work merges art and science in an emotional, poetic way, like music. I believe there is hope for the planet and us if we can understand on a visceral level that we ARE nature.
My history
My artwork reflects the world around me and the subjects that move and inspire me. I grew up on a goat farm in Arkansas, neglected by my overworked parents, and surrounded by rowdy animals, which I loved as an extension of my family. My love of animals was a recurring theme throughout my childhood – I raised turtles and obsessed over the saltwater aquariums I kept in my bedroom.
I attended the Columbus College of Art and Design for three semesters, dropped out when I was 19 and moved out to San Francisco with a couple suitcases, a goldfish and my dreams. Within a year I began meeting other artists and showing my art in group shows. One show led to the next and soon galleries were inviting me for solo shows.
Now I spend my life exploring the numerous complex relationships and connections I have with the natural world – my art reflects that exploration. I’ve had the opportunity to travel to very remote places - often joining scientific expeditions — where I’ve deepened my knowledge of our planet’s biodiversity. I continue to be deeply inspired by the surreal wonders and interconnectedness of nature. Read more about my fieldwork here.
To learn more about my process check out a recent interview I did with Art Affairs with Michael Faith. Episode #48.
And another interview I did for Beautiful Bizarre.
