As a life-long artist, Meta Strick explores a wide range of media. She began painting with watercolor as a child, around the time she started attending Saturday art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. During her teen years, in addition to prodigious drawing, she explored oil painting, and continued with this medium during college art classes at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. While there she learned calligraphy from Arnold Bank, a well-known calligrapher.
Since a real job was needed after college, she fell into the field of social work, where she remained until the State of Vermont offered an early retirement opportunity in the mid-nineties. It was a challenge to continue to make art while working full time and raising children, so the chance to cast off her day job was most welcome.
Over the years Meta has experimented with wood carving and construction, fiber arts to include weaving, surface decoration, silk painting and felting, polymer clay, basketry, letterpress and woodblock printing, paper arts and book arts. In her view, all these processes are much more interesting if they are combined in some way, and as a result she refers to herself as a mixed-media artist.
Community College of Vermont has invited Meta to teach various art and art history classes for the past twenty-five years, and she derives great enjoyment from this venture. Each year she schlepps her tent, shelves and mixed media art dolls and ornaments to a variety of fine art and craft shows in New England and Ohio. Meta has turned her entire house into a studio where she makes crazy jewelry to wear, paints on her clothes, and agrees with Andy Warhol, who said, “Art is what you can get away with.”
