Alexis Baranek is a mostly self-taught artist and she has been creating in various ways for most of her life and found it was a compulsion even as a young child. Her grade schoolteachers were often frustrated with the various doodles of faces and flowers she would draw on her history and science tests when she got bored! She was born and raised in beautiful and historic St. Augustine, Florida, where she lived next door to an established and rather eccentric artist, took art in high school, which was disappointing due to an instructor that really didn’t instruct, and painted a lot of duds in her own learning process, with the help of books and online courses. For many years she was forced to endure working in the administrative field before once again being able to pursue her love of painting and creating more fully while still maintaining the other important priorities in her life. Often the other things in life contribute to the artistic process in surprising ways. She spent 13 years in historic Charleston, South Carolina before moving back to Florida where she was a founding member of the Art League of North Florida. In 2014 she and her husband were able to fulfill their dream of living in Tennessee where their home on a hill with a view of Watts Bar Lake and mountains provides inspiration from her own deck. She continues to search for new methods of doing things and she finds it necessary to her restless artistic makeup to paint in more than one style, which keeps things fresh! She works in oils, acrylics and mixed media at the present time but who knows what the future will hold. Her paintings, both abstract and more realistic are in collections throughout the United States as well as England and Canada.
