Bio
Connie Millsaps is an oil and watercolor painter working directly with themes of sentimentality. She is interested in the critical tension associated with working with softness. She accesses this tension by studying our lived environment. Both through the landscape and in domestic spaces.
Born in the city of Chattanooga in 1993, she was raised as a millennial young woman in a slow moving south. She observes themes of gender and the complicated relationship she holds with the communities of her childhood. She contrasts this in her work with the hedonistic liberation of a life in the West, examining her puritanical upbringing against the pioneering spirit of the Pacific states.
She has split her life between the Southeast and the American West, and currently lives and works in the Southeast.
She is inspired by the iconic figures of Vincent Van Gough, Cynthia Daignault, David Hockney, Lois Dodd, Pierre Bonnard, Ruth Asawa, and Liuo Kuo-sung.
Exemplified in this quote from Hockney on Van Gough is the belief that careful looking is justification for a life’s work: “These places became interesting simply because he was looking at them.”