Studio Session: Artist Heather Weller

Artist Heather Weller might have ended up a chef.

“I was into baking in high school,” she recalls. “And I signed up for a culinary arts class, but it was full. Somehow I ended up in Intro to Art. Like Bob Ross says, it was a happy accident.”

Weller, who teaches art at the same Phoenix high school she attended as a kid, somehow managed to miss lessons on perspective and shading skills.

“I had to teach myself to paint,” she says of the large-scale oil paintings she makes. These days, they combine traditional photorealism with surrealist images and themes of mortality and human anxiety. Most paintings take her six months to a year to complete; others take longer.

“I’d like to say I have a process,” she says, “but I’m mostly just painting what I see in my brain. I wish I could say these images come from my dreams, but I never remember my dreams.”

She’s thought about doing something other than painting and teaching art, but these are the only things that feel right to Weller.

“Like everyone in my family is a nurse – my mom, my sister, my grandmother,” she says. “I’ve thought about it, and I’m not interested in the least. I pass out at the sight of blood.”