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Bio
Chelsea Villegas is a NJ based mixed-media painter whose work is rooted in a lifelong fascination with nature, history, and the handmade.
Raised in a home filled with art, music, and books, she spent much of her childhood outdoors and summers camping at folk festivals where she would wander art markets with her family. These early experiences fostered an appreciation for objects that bear the evidence of the human hand, textiles, folk art, old books, decorative arts, and things made beautiful through age and imperfection.
Villegas earned a B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Delaware, where she first encountered encaustic painting. For many years, wax became an integral part of her practice and helped establish her interest in layered, tactile surfaces.
Motherhood then shifted the course of her creative life. While raising and homeschooling her children, she continued painting in the margins of family life and eventually founded a nature-centered art program for children. Teaching, observing the natural world, and creating alongside children reinforced an intuitive approach to artmaking rooted in curiosity, experimentation, and discovery.
Her current work brings these threads together through oil, cold wax, drawing, collage, and mixed media. Botanical forms emerge from layered fields of color, pattern, fragmented imagery, pencil marks, and traces of metallic leaf. Drawing inspiration from antique textiles, wallpaper, folk and decorative arts, gardens, and the imperfect surfaces of objects altered by time, Villegas creates paintings that reward both an immediate encounter and slower, repeated looking.
Her work has been exhibited throughout the Northeast and is currently represented by Main Street Gallery in Manasquan, New Jersey, and Solace Gallery on Long Beach Island.
Artist Statement
My paintings begin without a clear destination. I build layers intuitively using color, scraped surfaces, drawing, fragments of pattern, paper, lace and textiles, allowing one decision to suggest the next.
From this initial abstraction, recognizable forms begin to emerge. Recently, botanical imagery has become a framework through which I can bring order to that visual chaos. Flowers and leaves are drawn over the painted surface, sometimes interrupting what came before and sometimes preserving it within their contours. Areas are covered, revealed, redrawn, or left partially unresolved.
I am deeply drawn to the natural world and things that carry a sense of history: worn wallpaper, antique textiles, lace, quilts, folk and decorative arts, old gardens, faded surfaces, and objects that reveal the touch of the person who made them. Rather than reproducing these things literally, I borrow their visual language, the repetition of pattern, evidence of the hand, irregularity, and the beauty that comes through imperfection and age.