Teresa N Ricci (b.2001) is an artist and educator from Upstate New York. She received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY New Paltz in 2022 and is an MFA student at SUNY Purchase.

My paintings act as a ritualistic, transmissible experience between past and present self, Mother Earth, and all her inhabitants. The picture plane is used as an arrival point for deconstructing hierarchies between humans and the world. Paintings push through the foggy unconscious and objects overlap; dreams and memories pool. Mirroring life, humor bleeds through the absurd. 

I developed a later appreciation of Mother Nature. She winds and firmly roots herself into paintings. Earth tones encompass and surround landscapes, animals, and figures. Humans converge and intertwine with environmental elements in my work: plants, animals, and humans. As we take their space, they reclaim ours, resulting in mythical beasts. How I create paintings mirrors environmental processes that are perpetually looped. They are tilled through a rigorous surface preparation and pruned to the essential moments through a constant destruction and restoration of the final image. At the end of it all, the painted images remain like genetics, connected to my parents’ history which is ingrained within me. 

As I’ve grown, I’ve noticed more parallels between my parents and myself. I have memories of my father showing me kaleidoscopic music videos that he obsessed over in his youth. My imagination exploded from these references, influencing a psychedelic worldview further enticing a merging of the elements of my surroundings. At that same age, my gardener mother encouraging me to laugh when things were difficult, to aid and sustain the worms lingering after a heavy rainstorm, encouraging a positive view instead of a critique of life.