Erica Steiner is a Bay Area-based artist whose work explores the idea that the basic human drive to ornament the material world fundamentally innate and irresistible. Her work seeks to use ornamentation as a disciplined and sustained practice and as a means of dialoging with fine art, folk art, and craft traditions such as Indian and Aboriginal painting, psychedelic art, graphic design, medieval Catholic illuminated manuscripts, mid-century modernism and Victorian imagery . The careful and ornate pattern work that forms the language of her pieces ultimately echos the cellular patterns that constitute all matter.

Erica's illustrative work is rendered in oil and gold leaf on canvas, painted in many layers, over time.

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