Today we’d like to introduce you to Cecile Pearson.
Cecile, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up in South Florida in a family that took art seriously early on. I studied graphic design, spent several years working in advertising, building visual discipline and client-facing experience, and nurtured a studio practice the entire time, painting whenever I could. Eventually, the studio practice outgrew everything else, and I went full-time with art.
I am now a professional fine artist based in Los Angeles. I make acrylic on canvas paintings built around recurring motif systems: vertical stripes, thorns, and knots, layered across a consistent three-part structure that moves from abstract background to patterned midground to a clear figurative subject boxed in the foreground. The work is currently showing in galleries across Los Angeles and entering private collections nationally.
South Florida is home. It is where my eye was trained, where I get a lot of my inspiration, and I return often.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Not entirely. Spending years working in advertising, on campaigns for clients like Google, American Eagle, and Jordan Brand, while building a studio practice in parallel, meant the work developed slowly and on borrowed time. Going full-time as an artist meant betting on something I had not yet fully tested at scale.
Building a collector base in a city as saturated as Los Angeles required showing up consistently, being genuinely present in the arts community, making friends, seeing incredible work, and letting relationships form naturally. These struggles are, of course, not unique to me. I came through it with a collector base, a consistent body of work, and a clear sense of what I am making and why.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a painter working in acrylic on canvas. My practice explores what rigid systems leave behind in buildings, behavior, and bodies. The paintings follow a deliberate three-layer formula that simultaneously performs and mocks rule-bound thinking: an abstract background that sets emotional tone, a repeating pattern of vertical stripes offset just past the halfway point on the canvas in the midground, and a clearly defined subject contained in a box in the foreground. Following a self-imposed system is the conceptual gesture itself, enacting the very logic the work is examining. It is ritual without doctrine.
What started as a daily discipline practice on small canvas panels evolved into the larger, more serious exhibition works I am showing now. After spending the past year studying thorns as a subject, the next body of work will follow the same process using knots, building toward another round of larger paintings.
My work is held in private collections across the country and has been shown at Gabba Gallery, Dorado 806 Projects, and the international art fair Tryst, which is hosted by Torrance Art Museum.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
The best way to support the work is to follow along on Instagram, join my email list, and come to the shows. Collectors and anyone interested in acquiring work can reach me directly through my website. On the collaboration side, I am always open to conversations with curators, gallerists, and fellow artists.
South Florida collectors especially: I am back regularly and would love to connect in person.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://cecileartist.wixsite.com/artist
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fathercecile/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Cecile-Pearson/61574025867171/
- Other: https://mailchi.mp/4c1674e06dfe/subscribe
