Bio and Artist Statement

Tonja Roberts is a contemporary mixed‑media and oil artist from southeastern Oklahoma, where she currently lives with family. She holds a B.S. in Psychology (2013) and worked as an Oklahoma‑state certified rehabilitation counselor and case manager from 2013–2017. Tonja began painting in 2015 shortly after a lupus diagnoses, and started selling her work soon after. She completed formal art training at Milan Art Institute in 2023. Tonja’s background in psychology and personal faith informs her process and the intentional emotional care embedded in her work. 

Her imaginative mixed‑media and oil paintings explore abstraction and encounters with the natural world and include occasional nature studies of animals and insects. Using texture, layered marks, and an intuitive color palette, Tonja creates ethereal, map‑like compositions that trace emotional and spiritual journeys. Her work has been shown at Chokma Si’ Gallery (Ada, OK), her work “Resilience”was included in Emerging Artworks of 2023: Women’s Edition, and her work was selected by the local Chamber of Commerce for a 2022 fundraiser. Tonja’s Musings of Light No. 1 received a Special Merit award and Musings of Light No. 2 received Special Recognition in the Light, Space & Time Gallery Exhibition (2025). She also accepts commissions and contributes work to community fundraising initiatives.

My work begins with an inner impulse—a vision, feeling, or remembered place—and unfolds through mixed media and oil. My work is therapeutic and exploratory. I explore mark, texture, and the interactions of materials to translate interior experience into visible form. Influenced by psychology, spirituality, and the rhythms of nature, I paint to release and shape emotion and reveal the unseen: creating layered, luminous surfaces that function as maps for reflection rather than literal narratives. I aim to make spaces where viewers can breathe, notice, and meet their own feelings—private things rendered public so they may transform into something useful, healing and beautiful. I create healing worlds.