Krista Skehan rediscovers painting, leading to show at CoffeeBar

Krista Skehan’s life has been a string of successes. Growing up in Lindenwood, she attended St. Francis High School, where she was on the boy’s golf team [there was no girl’s team] and acquired what she describes a “good foundation of water color techniques.”

Off to Indiana University, she did an individualized major that in addition to fine art, included business, advertising and journalism. “That was a little ahead of the time,” she recalls. “But I realized artists are amazing but don’t know how to make their art a business. The education there gave me a solid foundation.”

Following graduation, she worked in advertising in Chicago on both the business and creative side, and along the way married a man she’d met at university. Eventually they made it back to the Bay Area and founded the Menlo Park-based branding company, Personify.

All good, but something was missing, which led her to working with “an amazing life coach” starting about four years ago. “It was a coach for me — and for my brain,” she says. “I wrote down a lot of things I loved, things I really wanted to do.”

High on Krista’s list was painting, which leads us to the present where her acrylic works, along with some prints, will be on display — and for sale — at CoffeeBar in downtown Menlo Park on November 29 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. The public is invited; there will be wine and live music.

To get to where she is now, Krista participated in Art in Action and held a couple of private shows in homes.

“For me painting is extremely rejuvenating,” she says, “The exploration of other worlds in my mind feeds my soul.

“This has been a process of reprioritizing my life. The first step was bringing the easel that was stuck in the garage into the house. That started it all!

Photo by Linda Hubbard (c) 2018; top painting West Coast Rivera (36×48); second painting Weekend Warrior (10×10)