Debi Varvi
Debi Varvi has been an artist since she first picked up a crayon.
Born in Texas in 1956, her father was a fighter pilot in the Air Force and her mother was a homemaker. She traveled extensively with her family, absorbing art and culture on a global scale. With her rich Italian heritage, her family instilled in her an immigrant’s pride of place, history, and a healthy suspicion concerning organized religions. Perhaps because of her exposure to so much variety and strangeness, she is fascinated and bemused by humans and their weird ways. Happily, her parents encouraged her artistic endeavors, even though they were often confused by her obsessions with mythological stories, monsters, and anthropomorphic creatures.
Making her current home in Southern California, Debra enjoys adorning festival goers with the ancient art of henna in the summers and, when she isn’t traveling, spends the rest of her time in her home studio. She is currently immersed in her series on dead angels and saints, lovingly rendered on maps in color pencil, gold leaf, ink, and henna paste. In 2022 she began taking print classes at Division 9 Gallery, hungry for the challenge of learning new techniques, which she feels creates new opportunities for artistic exploration.
You can often find her work in person at the Riverside Community Art
Association, The Corona Art Colony, The Riverside Art Museum, and Division 9 Gallery. Her online presence is on her website at www.debivarvistudio.com, and on Instagram @debivarvistudioe.