Art Beat: Heather Gauthier

Heather Gauthier Art

Heather Gauthier has been painting various things since she was a young teenager. “I was homeschooled in Lubbock in the ‘80s. I wasn’t exposed to much, and my first experience with a paintbrush came when I got a job painting houses at 13 years old. I could make things happen with paint. Since then, I’ve been painting everything. Everything.”

After a decade of living in Chicago and South Africa, Heather, her husband, and her son moved to San Antonio in 2010. With her second son’s birth came the burning desire to be an artist. She began with a collection of paintings in 2013, and by 2015 Heather was working as a full-time artist.

“By 2018, I was begging my husband to retire so I could paint more. I was selling in galleries in Napa, Aspen, NOLA, Santa Fe, Austin, and even Singapore,” she says. “It’s been an artist’s dream.”

But by 2019, the demand was far exceeding what Heather could produce. A strange thing happened as she began to scale back and slow down.

“I suddenly started getting better. After years of painting for sixty-hour weeks, new skills emerged. It was like leveling up in a video game. I might have learned skills in Painting 101 had I taken it.” Her pace slowed, and as it did, her work became more realistic and the colors more saturated.

“It’s slow food now,” she says. “But I am excited that change is possible, and I can’t wait to see my art in 20 years.”

Heather’s galleries sold out of her work during the pandemic, and in an effort to slow life down, she began selling exclusively on Instagram, Facebook, and her website. “I have a tiny home studio in which we spend a lot of time. I’ll have a different pace when my boys are out of school. But for now, I paint what I love. How lucky am I?”