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For our first episode of the year, we sat down with Romona Youngquist, an artist who describes herself as a lifelong “country girl” and homebody whose deepest desire has always been to paint the rural surroundings she loves, often within a 20-mile radius of her home. She recalls recognizing her calling as an artist as early as age four or five, and later feeling that oil paint was her true medium after experimenting with watercolor and acrylics in college. She also tells us about how throughout her life she held a series of unconventional jobs, but always returned to nostalgic rural landscapes, eventually realizing she could not keep a “normal” job and had to make art her livelihood. Romona explains that her paintings are driven by intuition, memory, and emotion rather than strict realism: she chases a very specific feeling in the light and design of a scene, mixing plein air sketches, photos, and childhood memories of Oklahoma’s skies and trees. She also talks about the tension between nostalgia and change, seeing herself partly as a visual historian preserving vanishing farmsteads, gardens, and rural spaces, and notes how her work has evolved toward more layering and a desire for greater simplification and abstraction. Romona offers advice to aspiring artists; she stresses building a large, solid body of work, considering financial stability, and accepting that painting is an ongoing, often difficult process where doubt never fully disappears, but commitment to one’s vision is essential. Finally, Romona tells us about her upcoming shows!

Romona's FASO site:

romonayoungquist.com

Romona's Instagram:

instagram.com/rlyoungquist/