Mia Halton evokes the complexity of domestic life in paintings, drawings and prints. Her works are dense with images of figures and ordinary objects with poetic resonance, such as buttons, rulers and hammers. Halton integrates images and materials to create works that reflect the energy and emotions of human interactions.

Halton was born in 1950 in Philadelphia and grew up in a family of artists, including her maternal grandparents and her mother. She remember her early art making as both a refuge and a way to make sense of the emotional vagaries of family life. At Kenyon College she majored in art and religion, and while there she encountered the work of the French artist Jean Dubuffet. He was a seminal discovery for her, for his ability to access the dark side of inner life, and for his direct use of raw materiality. Other painters important to Halton’s development have been Jackson Pollock, for his intuitive layering of paint in over-all compositions, and Philip Guston for his straight-forward, bold drawing and his existential examination of the self. After college, Halton moved back to the East Coast, began illustrating children’s books, and then taught high school. After a period of independent work, she studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she received an MFA in 1985. While in graduate school, Halton worked on sheets of Luon plywood, created process-oriented paintings. This exploration of paint’s material qualities anticipate the physicality of her current work. While in school, Halton became involved with printmaking, which she continues to pursue in an Artist’s Residency at the University of Maryland, Townsend.

Color has played a crucial role in Halton’s work, moving from the acid, pastel colors of her work as a graduate student, to the darker palette of her post-school years, to her present use of rich, jewel-like hues, often contrasting with fields of white paint. From the beginning the role of figures was central, ranging from cartoon-like, graphic images to more gestural forms. It is the pictorial space between the figures and forms that has continually evolved in Halton’s work. Printmaking has given her work a layered transparency, while her prints have a strong painterly quality. Halton’s graphic experience extended to a fabric design business which she ran from the early 90s until 2002.

Halton’s work since then incorporates some of the repetition and pattern developed in her fabric designs. Her new body of paintings display a growing vocabulary of mark-making, a refinement of technique and a deepening psychological engagement. She has shown her work extensively, including exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, OK Harris Works of Art, New York, Gallery K, Washington, D.C., Malton Gallery, Cleveland and Gomez Gallery, Baltimore. Halton’s work is in the collections of the U.S. State Department and Kenyon College, and in numerous private collections.