Marietta Canoza was born in 1960 in the Philippines and came to the United States with her family at age fourteen. She began making art at Creativity Explored in 1990, moved to our second studio when it opened in 1995, and worked through 2006.
As evident in her heavily impastoed paintings, Canoza stressed that texture is important to her artwork. She employed heavy brushstrokes and built layer upon layer of saturated, jewel-toned colors on each canvas. She often incorporated paper, cardboard, and found objects in her paintings to increase the textural quality. The very process of painting was essential to Canoza. It appeared that her emotions and thoughts while working became integrated into her pieces and she even took out aggression on her canvases.