Artist Bio
Born in Brooklyn, and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Gwendalin Aranya has been an artist her entire life. She began at a young age by sitting behind her mother drawing as her mother painted.
At 16, Ms. Aranya attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock where she illustrated a field guide to medicinal plants. It was at Rutgers University in New Jersey two years later that she first picked up a paintbrush and learned to paint. Delighted with painting, she quit school to become a painter. In 1989, Ms. Aranya was one of the founding members of the gallery Vox Populi in Philadelphia. After a year she returned to Temple University to complete her bachelor’s degree in Linguistics. While she continued to paint, exhibit, and sell, she also continued her education. After earning an MS degree in Mathematics in 1992, she worked toward a Ph.D. in Art Theory and Practice and Computer Science at the University of Western Australia. She ultimately completed an MFA in Painting at Howard University in 2005.
In her early twenties, Ms. Aranya discovered Zen Buddhism and at once knew that her approach to art was Zen. She had been meditating since the age of thirteen. Since the discovery of Zen, she has considered herself a Zen artist. Simply put, Zen art is created as a meditation in which the artist and subject are one. It is not planned, and it does not come from a place of thinking, but rather a place of being. There is no subject and no object.
A few years after making these discoveries of Zen and Zen art, Ms. Aranya became an ordained Zen priest. She recently relocated to Southwest Florida, where she dedicates her time to sharing Zen through art.