Painting Workshop

Visiting Artist and Instructor
Meridy Volz is known for her inventive use of intense color. This award-winning artist uses the figure in all her work to express passion and sensuality. Her work is best described as gestural, and Expressionist with an Impressionist palette. Paintings are rendered in oil and drawings in pastels and oil pastels. Volz uses texture and stroke to create an impasto surface on the canvas, thus invoking a vibrant movement of energy, and the shockingly innovative use of electric color creates the mood. Volz paints with her fingers and palette knife.

Volz has been painting since she was three. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 28, 1947, and received her first art scholarship at the age of six to the Milwaukee Art Center. She went on to graduate from The University of Wisconsin with a degree in art education in 1971 and worked as an illustrator/consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation. Volz then moved to San Francisco, where her work received numerous awards, such as the California Discovery Award and multiple best of show awards in juried exhibitions and had many Northern California solo exhibitions. During this period, she taught art workshops at San Quenton for the Arts in Prisons Program and taught art to adults and children in various venues. Volz then moved to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she lived for a decade working and showing in one woman shows. She has work in numerous private collections. In 2010, she won First Place at the Palm Springs Art Museum Artist Council Exhibition and Third Place in 2011.

Volz now resides in Cathedral City, California. She teaches life-drawing at The Desert Arts Center. She is the founder, director and art teacher of “Art with Heart,” an art program initially for incarcerated children, and presently for at-risk and gang teens in Desert Hot Springs. She is presently teaching group painting and drawing lessons at various desert resort communities, including The Reserve, The Springs, Marrakesh, The Lakes, and Presidential Estates. Meridy offers private lessons as well. Every summer she teaches at the Wyly Community Art Center.