Mimi Matsuda Art

I am a full-time artist living in Bozeman, Montana. I grew up with a love of animals and had pet chickens, rats, birds and fish as a kid and studied biology in school. I enjoyed exploring for salamanders, fishing for trout and watching birds and mammals in the evergreen forests of Oregon. After graduating from college with a degree in biology, I worked my dream job in the National Parks, as a National Park Ranger Naturalist for Yellowstone and Grand Teton Parks. I used my artwork in my work as a naturalist to illustrate some of the principles on my guided hikes. This led to a new career as a full-time artist. Today I paint to encourage people to emotionally connect with nature, sometimes through sheer beauty, sometimes through humor. I am a new mom to identical twins and love to paint imagery that young to old and families/parents can enjoy. I hope the connections to the art will lead to preservation and protection of wildlands and animals.

My mom was an art teacher and her granddad was a commercial artist. I grew up exposed to art and animals so I think it was destiny. Also, there were many encouraging people in my life who said, “You can do it.”

Ideas come to me when I’m out and about on a run or ride. I love the challenge of my whimsical art where I strive to get the animals to convey emotion and speak to the audience. With twin toddlers, somedays I can barely get any artwork done, other days I work while they nap and many days I work after they go to sleep in the evening. I’m much more of a night-owl artist. I work at my house, in a room off the kitchen, so the worktable is always there looking at me :). I really enjoy the variety of mediums; each one has its merits for each project I tackle. I love soft pastels on sanded pastelboard (the tooth is awesome for holding the pastels and you can layer color.) There’s nothing like the freshness of watercolor on crisp white paper. Acrylics and oils on canvas or pine are spectacular for detail work and going big.