Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Rhonda C R Burton . We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Rhonda, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

As a child I knew I wanted to create…to be an artist. I remember waking up at night and finding my mother painting in our kitchen, She would set up still lives of cups and saucers and plates, of cracked eggs in bowls, anything she could put together. Watching her made me think that creating art was something I wanted and needed to do, it made sense to me.

Rhonda, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Getting married a few years after school, I began to work in the jewelry and diamond industry. I learned to sort diamonds, to recoginze the subtle color changes in the diamonds, to appreciate their cut and clarity. Although I was around incredibly beautiful things each day, it did not fulfill my need to be creative. One day, I meet a friend who was a taking an art class at a nearby local art school. As soon a I entered the school, I knew immediately, I needed to be there. I took drawing and watercolor classes at night and within a year, I was showing and selling my work and I began to teach at the school. I was exactly where I was suppose to be at that moment in my life and I love it.

My marriage was breaking up, and as the mother of two young daughters, my teaching and sales were not enough to support us, so I put my art career on hold. I went into the corporate world for nearly 30 years. During that timeframe, I just couldn’t do art, I could not be creative, everything was black or white, there was no color. As the pressure of work became too much to bear, I began taking pictures on my daily walks. My images of flowers, succulents and trees that I saw each day became my outlet for my creativity. They were full of color and texture and I loved the sense of creating art again. I loved what it did for me and how I began to feel. To see the world of color again was like someone opened a window and I could breathe again. I decided to use my images on fabric, and to create a line of stationary items that I sold online. After a while of selling online, I began to feel confident again in my creativity, I was thrilled to show and sell my work again. My photography became mixed media works, using watercolor, color pencil, pastel, collage and monoprints.

My work is shown at TAG Gallery in Los Angeles, Agora Gallery in NYC and Women Painters West.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I know exactly what is driving my journey, About 5 years ago, after being diagnosed with with a serious life threating illness, enduring 6 months of treatment and 2 surgeries, I was lying in a hospital bed and I asked myself “what am I waiting for?”. My sense of time shifted, I decided can no longer be hesitant. Being hesitant, to acquiesce no longer works for me. I need to reach out and doing something with my work, once I made that decision, within a couple of months, I had created a new body of work and within a year had a solo show of my work driving my current journey.

My mantra and the goal that drives me now is: “what am I waiting for?”

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Being a creative to me, is seeing the world a bit differently, I often feel that I see things that others might overlook or miss. I love looking at even the most mundane or ordinary things and trying to find something beautiful in them. Looking at things from a slightly different angle, I find the variations of color in the petals of flowers, the patterns on the leaves of the succulents or the textures of the tree bark. Whether it is taking my photographs at very close range, or repeating an image over and over again to create or enhance it’s pattern

When you look at the world differently, you see things you might have missed before.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @rhondaburtonart and @kentwood524designs