While formally trained in painting with a bachelor’s degree from Mills College in Oakland and a master’s degree in teaching from UC Davis, the Sacramento-based Peart often uses nontraditional techniques to create her works, including painting on wood panels, incorporating digital manipulation and elements of design and architecture. She also uses distinct color palettes — muted earth tones with unexpected pops of bright blues, greens or pastels.

“In my studio, I am often practicing how to let go of traditional painting techniques and color theory and be more joyful and playful and experimental,” Peart says.

Peart’s process, while experimental, is meticulous. She often begins with nature hikes, sketching and photographing her subjects in person. Back in her home studio near Midtown, she translates these observations into paintings. Sometimes Peart scans these into her computer and then manipulates elements in Photoshop, creating digital paintings.

Combining mediums is another tool in Peart’s pencilbox. Her highly detailed paintings often incorporate drawing materials such as chalk, charcoal and ink, and she doesn’t stick to just one type of paint, either. She uses acrylic, watercolor, oil and pastels, creating her own signature style.

The 37-year-old artist credits her childhood in rural El Dorado County for fostering her deep connection to nature, which is evident in her paintings. Calling her paintings “portals of possibility,” Peart hopes to spark dialogue and inspire environmental advocacy for natural spaces with her art.

Three years into a full-time art career, Peart’s art is definitely sparking conversation. What began as a year-long sabbatical from her decade-long teaching career in 2022 turned into a full-time gig exhibiting at local markets, galleries and events like First Friday and Second Saturday. She also sells archival prints and original art online and regularly works on commissions, such as her City of Trees series that featured iconic Sacramento landmarks.

Peart was a featured artist in the December 2024 issue of Create! Magazine, and the 80-square-foot backyard studio she built with the help of her father was recently featured in In Her Studio Magazine.

Can you describe your artistic style and how you developed it?

I have come to describe my paintings as visionary landscapes because I blend natural environments, natural scenes with architectural elements and graphic motifs. My style evolved from my deep love of traditional landscape painting, merged with inspirations from the design world and vintage science fiction aesthetic. I’m a big science fiction fantasy nerd, and the way authors build the detailed worlds and alternative futures that they build inspires me to paint and envision brighter futures for our environment. So I feel like my little visionary landscape term pulls from visionary science fiction and authors that are world-building and imagining us out of these problems that we have created.

Who are some of your favorite authors?

Octavia Butler is my number one. She was an incredible, prolific science fiction speculative fiction author. … I also love Ursula Le Guin books. These books give us different ways of being, to think of different futures and not doom and gloom but solutions and how to move past what humans are currently doing.

That ties in with your focus on sustainability. Can you talk about how that might show up in your art? Obviously, you’re painting and depicting these beautiful places, but do you see any other way that you’re addressing these kinds of issues?

I think a lot of artists, especially in art school, we’re not taught to think of ourselves as business owners or entrepreneurs. But I have an entire business modeled after regenerative systems looking to nature, looking to how interconnected and regenerative the natural world is. So not just my painting practice, but my art business. I build my own wooden panels with my dad and his cabinet shop. I source FSC-certified wood. FSC wood is wood that’s been harvested responsibly, like low-impact logging. I try to use non-toxic paints. I love to experiment with making my own pigment, but that is very hard to make.

My goal as an artist is to create work that sparks dialogue about our relationship with the planet and hopefully inspires action towards sustainability. I think the only way to protect our natural spaces in our public lands is to ensure that people care about them and act and vote to protect them. And the only way to do that is to make sure nature is accessible to them and that they enjoy it and have a good time and look at those natural spaces.

Speaking of your business model, you recently got some pretty big media coverage. Do you have any advice to other artists on how they can get their art in front of a larger audience?

Yeah, I think that not waiting around and definitely not spending hours on social media, comparing yourself to other artists who have all these collaborations and features, that you can even — there are downsides to AI, but using it for good — using some of these AI generators to ask what opportunities are out there for emerging artists or emerging artists within your niche, whether you’re a photographer or a landscape painter, and reaching out and submitting for calls for art, calls for articles. … Definitely building your art community and building your confidence, learning how to talk about your art. And trading with friends. Maybe you have a friend that’s really good at photography or writing and using that.

Yes, absolutely. Sacramento has an incredible community of artists. I have made a lot of creative friends here. I see a lot less pretentiousness than in bigger cities. People are just open and willing to help. Folks hold the doors of opportunity open for you and share resources in ways I didn’t even see in art school.

The Second Saturday and First Friday events are big community-building events. Spaces like Sol Collective and the Latino Art and Culture Center and businesses like Art Tonic offer services and learning opportunities for emerging artists, folks just trying to get their website off the ground. Made Studio is another space where artists can learn new skills.

What would you like to see happen in Sacramento’s art scene?

I’ve traveled to Austin, I’ve traveled to Denver and Phoenix, these art cities, these new art cities that have collectors, that have a gallery culture, they have countless galleries and multiple art districts. And I just think Sacramento has been so close to that for years and there really is no excuse as the capital city of the most creative state. So I want to see more opportunities for California artists, and I think we’re close. We’re having the exodus of people from the Bay, people from Silicon Valley are here, and that’s what happened to Austin and Denver. We’re so close.

So I want people to support the arts and get out to the Second Saturday and First Friday, and also collaborate with artists. Hire an artist to make your cover art for your music release, not just an AI-generated graphic, which we can tell is AI.

I do want more for artists in Sacramento. We need more opportunities. More paid murals, more community art, more collaborations. I went to a winery last weekend and they had a brand new large-scale sculpture from an artist in Australia. It was gorgeous, but it had me thinking what that opportunity could have meant to my Sacramento sculpture friends.

Tell me about what you are currently working on.

I’m working on a series called State of Change Vision of California. So I’m intentionally painting beautiful spaces and California’s beautiful, fragile environments that need to be tended — to need to re-remember, relearn that we are stewards, stewards of this living planet. We are not separate from nature. We are part of.

That will debut at Super Fine Art Fair in San Francisco at the beginning of March. This series is about painting our beloved California landscapes and talking about what that space, what that environment could look like fully restored or what it may have looked like before colonization.

So I have a painting of what that valley may have looked like, because the painters that came from Europe to paint Yosemite focused on Yosemite Valley, and they were not there before. The sheep had already moved in and destroyed that valley. So we only have imaginations for what it could have looked like and what it could look like fully restored.

Edited for length and clarity.

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