Marsha Boston is a painter who works and lives in Escondido, California. She’s a graduate of the University of California, San Diego where she obtained her MFA in 1983. She obtained her BA from the same university in 1979. Her work has centered on the concepts and myths that have defined the human relationship to nature during the last two decades. Marsha discovered her delight and fascination with the subject of botany while she was researching material for her series of paintings that she focused on the application of recombinant DNA technology to food crops. Marsha was concerned with the accelerated speed of human dominion over nature, the uncertain realities of genetic engineering, and her reverence for the design of plants which she considered as miraculous. Currently, Marsha is exploring the relationship between our mechanistic world view and the practice of indigenous herbalism.
During the time of her research, she developed a serious allergy to the ammonia and formaldehyde in acrylic paint. This forced her to change to ink and watercolor to do the studies of the medicinal plants of California. She begins the organic forms in her work as representational drawings, and then through kinetic memory and repetition, she simplifies the drawings and combines them with open color. For Marsha, the language of the colors and marks parallel the subtler more invisible qualities of the plants. In 2013 she had a solo exhibition at Hera Hub Sorrento, San Diego, CA, and in 2014, she had another solo exhibition at Escondido Municipal Gallery, Escondido, CA.
