Tina Blondell was born in 1953 in Salzburg, Austria, to an American father and Austrian mother who encouraged her early interest in art. As a child, her father taught her to draw, and travels with her parents exposed her to art throughout Europe. Although early on she attended private art lessons and later took classes in painting, Blondell is essentially self-taught. Crucial to her education as an artist, was her first-hand encounters with art in Italy, particularly the work of Caravaggio, with its sense of stage-lit drama, and of Artemisia Gentileschi, whose powerful paintings and life as...more