Staci Marie Swider

Staci Swider has been making art forever, and she remembers making furniture for her dollhouse out of recycled materials, and clothing for her dolls. This love for design led her to study textile design in college, and later create a career as a fabric designer/stylist in the home furnishings industry. Eventually the corporate world gave way to motherhood, and freelance design replaced boardroom presentations. It was during those years that she discovered a love for paining, initially with watercolors. Currently she paints with acrylics, layering those with oil pastels and grease pencil, throwing a little collage at it on occasion, and building things just to shake it up a little. Staci’s work has been featured in many solo and group shows, and has appeared in Cloth Paper Scissors and Quilting Arts magazines among others. Her new book is Acrylic Expressions: Painting Authentic Themes and Creating Your Visual Vocabulary, and she has a new set of four DVDs with Artists Network TV.