Artist Story

Tonja Elisha Horne Betts formally began painting in 2022 as a form of therapeutic escape, experimenting in various media such as watercolor, oil pastels, charcoal, and collage, with a concentration in acrylic. She’s a great admirer of expressionist art and the distortion and disproportion of figures.  Some of the influences of her art style are cubist and mosaic techniques, as well as the works of artists such as Ruby C. Williams and Jean-Michel Basquiat, with their chunks of evocative poetry-features braided into brilliant methods of depiction and color palettes. Tonja, as well, writes poems, along with children’s stories and song lyrics, and incorporates these elements in her paintings. God, Himself—the greatest Creator, Artist and Poet—has given us the gift of nature that lends inspiration to her practice. She pulls ideas from the irregularity of lines and knots of wood grain, contorted cracks in pavements, the languages of flowers, and the integration of soils and mulch piles.  Some of her art’s subjects range from childhood remembrances to motherhood to southern life to spirituality.  Her collections cover matters about black hair—channeling its beauty, energy, challenges, imaginativeness, and value because hair-hate is a thing; about mental health—dealing with anxieties and the wanting to be whole without holes; and about aging—handling and adjusting to the feminine changes of the body, mind, and soul, particularly during and after menopause. For Tonja, activating art is a tapping into a spiritual drama. In fact, she approaches her artwork with a whimsical anagrammatic formula, whereby ART equals TAR plus RAT:  TAR being the layered mediums in their ever-shifting viscousness (the base, the bass, the timbre); and RAT being the irRATional and eccentric tap-tap-tap-dance atop (the clamber, the destruction, the polyphasic and profound sleep).