“Since I have benefited from making art, and it has been part of my healing journey, I want other people to have that opportunity. I want to help as many people as I can, providing the place and the materials, because I am passionate about art and what an incredible practice it is. You move emotions by making art.”

Fine artist Bea Ortiz has had her own health issues abated by staying true to her artistic practice.

Having arrived in New York City in 1998 from her native Spain after graduating in 1997, her first job as an artist was restoring a mural in a Spanish restaurant in Astor Place. The owner of the restaurant, which had suffered a leak that washed out the painting on one wall, asked her if she could re-paint the damaged wall of the mural that resembled the work of Joan Miro. The restoration was a success and the owner was pleased with her work, so he recommended her to other people. Soon she had a thriving business in the decorative arts: painting murals, gilding and creating faux finishes like marble and Venetian plaster, in private homes and businesses across the city, elsewhere in the US and abroad. She also did set design creating murals and faux finishes for an advertising company based in Long Island City.

“I didn’t know that there was such a world before I got into it”, she says. “First off, I had to learn a lot of very specific English. When anybody asked me if I could do [a job], I just said yes, and if I didn’t know, I would just figure it out. Mostly, I would be working in a team, so I was learning as I went, tips and tricks even taping – to prepare for painting – is a method.  How to prepare surfaces. So, I learnt a lot of technical things about this trade that I did not learn in college.”

After many years of freelancing, in 2016 Bea took a full-time job in decorative arts and shortly thereafter her health began to deteriorate. She experienced a lot of physical difficulties in a job in which she had to be very athletic on a daily basis, climbing scaffolding and constantly moving. “I could barely walk. I couldn’t move my hands. It became an incredible struggle just to make it to work”.

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