Debra Susan Gross

Debra Susan Gross
Biography

 As an artist and lifelong learner who lives in Plano, Texas. I am passionate about painting and drawing as well as ceramics. I graduated from Texas Woman's University in December, 2009 with a Master of Arts in Teaching and a certification in Early Childhood to Grade 12 Art Education. I have been studying painting for over twenty years and have been selling my work professionally since 2002.  My paintings, drawings, and ceramics are reflections a lifetime of study of art, dance, and music.

     I was born in Buffalo, New York, grew up in Massachusetts and have been involved in the visual and performing arts all of my life.  I began drawing while in pre-school and my first art teacher was my Mother, herself an avid artist, singer, and actress, who taught me to draw and work with various media. I started dance lessons at age five, studying ballet, tap, jazz, and baton. I performed on television and on stage and was part of a Mother/Daughter dance team for a number of years. I also competed and won medals in baton twirling. At age twelve, I discovered guitar and voice, and have been playing guitar and studying vocal performance ever since.

     I received a Bachelor of Science in Fashion Merchandising from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1979.  In 1990, I returned to university to study Painting and Drawing, something that I had wanted to pursue for many years.  Prior to enrolling in the MAT program, I attended TWU from 1993 to 1996 as a post-baccalaureate and Graduate Student in Fine Arts.  I have two grown sons and am an avid traveler.  I have been travelling to Zurich, Switzerland and Florence, Italy almost annually since 1992 and much of my body of work contains imagery and references to these wonderful cities.  I spend a lot of time drawing and believe that discipline mastery, especially drawing well and understanding compositional elements, is the key to being able to compose creatively and imaginatively.  While I prefer to draw from life, my paintings tend to be more childlike, imaginative, and expressive in nature. My approach to painting is process-oriented. Each painting begins with a successful drawing, followed by layers of color, built up through various techniques, including glazing and scumbling. Composition, value, pattern, and texture are ever present in my paintings and through the process of working the canvas, paper, or panel, there are always elements of the unexpected - no two paintings are identical. I enjoy drawing as much as painting and when on a location, my preferred medium is ink.  I also really enjoy charcoal and pastel and regularly integrate them with various paint media. The third element which is prominent in my work is that of collage.  I just love working with papers and layering them in different ways.  Sometimes I create an under painting of collage and then paint on top, leaving areas of collage showing through.  At other times, I will work the composition in paint and pastel and add the collage elements at the end.  Sometimes, I will compose with collage alone.