Vanessa Peters

The Meditating Buddha, 2021

Acrylic on canvas

12 x 12"

Value: $400

The Buddha's hands are in the mudra for opening the sacral chakra (creativity). The Red-Winged Blackbird represents a heighten awareness of a personal/spiritual journey.

*This piece will be available for the ticket price on opening night.

Artist Bio:

Vanessa Peters is a Latina artist based out of Brooklyn, New York. Her passion for art came from learning to draw and sketch by copying the images she found in her father's old art books. Vanessa studied English and art at The City College of New York.
After a 7 year stretch of not painting, she picked up her brush again in 2013. Vanessa began recreating her own image to find the beauty in herself. To love her body as a piece of art she was creating in the hopes that it would be the way to discovering herself. Self-portraits have the ability to show the full spectrum of a personality, heartache and emotions caught in a single moment, in one look. The depiction of the Buddha in her work speaks to her own spiritual journey as a Buddhist and the growth and connection she feels in her practice.
A large portion of her pieces also include animal totems of the Red-winged Blackbird and the Octopus. Both animals used in her paintings are symbolic of different experiences or emotions felt internally but made flesh in the painting. They serve as visual talismans of one's feelings at a particular moment time.
She paints oil and acrylic figurative paintings out of her apartment in Crown Heights.