Nado Partido
Betsy DeFusco, a native of Jamestown, New York, received a degree in Art Education from the University of Dayton. In her earlier career as an artist, she worked as an illustrator, completing house portrait commissions, designing and illustrating a calendar of Columbus landmarks, and designing notecards. She also designed and reproduced pen and ink drawings that were then hand colored and marketed widely under the company name Attic Arts. In 1992 she returned to school and completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing from The Ohio State University. Since then she has made painting her focus, working on paper, canvas and wood. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings Magazine and Studio Visit Magazine and has been widely exhibited nationally. Recent solo or two person shows include Keny Galleries in 2008, The Hudson D Walker Gallery at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 2011, and the Dayton Visual Arts Center in 2001. She has been given awards at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Tennessee and the Muse Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2007 she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her paintings were presented as the awards at the Ohio Governor’s Awards for the Arts event in 2008. Her work is included in the public collections of Alliance Capital in New York, Huntington National Bank in Cleveland, and Microcom Corporation in Columbus.
This painting is one of a series of fish paintings that had its beginnings in 2011, after we moved into a house with 2 small fish ponds. Watching the fish swim around is probably one of the most calming and relaxing things I do, and I now understand the attraction of large indoor aquariums with their colorful inhabitants, swimming around effortlessly in a swirl of color. In the middle of working on this piece it changed from being about pond fish to ocean fish, as I used images from Instagram as my inspiration. Using the fish lovers’ images from Instagram and taking a few trips to the aquarium store has revived my interest in all of the life that takes place under the water. “Nado Partido” translates to “Swimming Party”, because that is what these fish and the sea snakes in my painting are having!