Like the two paintings I just delivered last night of a mother and daughter. I would love to just do larger and grander scale paintings – both in scale and in concept. I just can’t see it changing to a great degree. I’d like to keep doing the same thing I’m doing now, but just charging more. I think there’s nothing better than that. “I think the dream is – I’m absolutely loving what I’m doing now – there’s nothing more fun to me with my job than meeting with a beautiful person, taking their photograph, and I find beauty in every one, and painting it. Where would you like to be in five years? I have been showing for about fourteen years.” “I’ve been in over 30 galleries over the years and I’m in about four right now. Tell me about the galleries in which you’ve shown your work. I just hope to keep using their techniques and prove that that kind of painting is not dead in our society.” I could be living in the 16th century and I think you can learn so much from going back in history, and studying what the masters have done. I try to run away from oil painting, but it’s not meant to be, I’m meant to be a classic oil painter. “The most difficult thing about what I have to do every day is to wake up in the morning and not feel like I should instantly be communicating with groups of people.

What’s the most difficult thing about your career? I paint from photographs – using it as a part of my artistic medium, because it gives me the chance to capture a certain moment in time and bring it to life.” These are going to be the main pieces in his huge grand entry room and the main focal point when you walk into the room with 20′ ceilings. I’m painting his 18-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son in a very classical style, almost like the Mona Lisa. I’m doing a set of paintings on commission which are for a very wealthy man in Laguna Beach. I’ll be doing a painting and raffling it off and hope to make $5,000 or $10,000, with that money being given as a scholarship.” My aunt is the Saddleback College Foundation fundraiser for the EOPS program – the Extended Opportunity Program in Services – for the disadvantaged. “The next fundraiser we’re going to do is in conjunction with Saddleback College. The best part was in hearing from some of these women who benefited, saying how it had saved their lives and that of their children. We did and were able to raise the $50,000, partly because we got one private donation of $25,000 and sold tickets for the rest. I suggested we do a painting and sell raffle tickets. This was in Northern California and they needed $50,000 to fund the program. They go into this program with their children and are able to get off drugs. Last year I came up with the idea for a fundraiser for a children’s program to help drug-addicted mothers. I don’t really remember her, but I do remember her sketchbooks and her drawings, and memories of these women that she’d draw stayed with me. I also went to Palomar College, Saddleback College, Academy of Arts San Francisco, and the Art Institute of Southern California and Laguna Beach.” I was introduced to ballet and opera, and was always around adults and going to great events. I would take film classes like the college kids.

I was enrolled in film classes at the college of Marin, where my aunt was the Director of Student Services programs for disabled students. Every year we’d put on a play and I did film animation when I was like 11 years old.

“I went to North Bay School, in Marin City, a unique elementary school with only 50 students, and three teachers to a classroom, from kindergarten to ninth grade. She was the one who raised me and during that time I actually started painting.” My mom died when I was 5 and I went to live with my aunt, Lise Telson in Sausalito.

I ended up in Canada with my mother, then went to Peru with my dad, and actually spoke Spanish as my first language. It was just a summer of love! We lived there for about a year, and then we spent about a year traveling around the country. There was a whole group of families living there in the ’70s. “My parents were hippies at that time – in a commune in the jungles of Kauai. “I was born in Kauai, in a storm – in a tree house!” Maya Spielman began her story.

Maya spielman feet