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Daddy’s little
girl
Tirza Buchetto
is making a name for herself
By Nicki
Escudero
Published on
03/16/2006
The chip and the block:
Louis and Tirza Buchetto at their downtown
Leroux Street studio. Photo by Josh Biggs
http://photos.azdailysun.com Josh Biggs/Arizona
Daily Sun
| Many
6-year-olds in kindergarten spend their days
doing sing-a-longs, learning letters of the
alphabet, and heading home after their half-day
to watch cartoons and eat cookies. Six-year-old
Tirza Buchetto likes cookies, too, but she’s
looking at them as more than just a tasty
snack—they’re the subject of her latest piece of
art, which may find its way into her artist
dad’s popular Flagstaff shop.
Tirza already has
nine masterpieces hanging in My Art Place (20 N.
Leroux St.), which are the result of her
collaboration with her father, Louis, who has
almost 30 more paintings for
sale.
“This is a
pretty natural progression of her doing art with
me, because basically for four years, she’s been
with me in the studio at least 20 hours a week,”
Louis says. “She would see me do art, so it’s
pretty natural she would want to
participate.”
When
she was 3 years old, Tirza approached Louis
about selling her own art, too. Louis took some
of her original drawings and converted them into
greeting cards, which were a huge hit. She also
sold her first original painting when she was 3.
It was purchased for $7, and Tirza’s first big
purchase was a huge stuffed
lamb.
“I wanted to
make money to buy stuff,” Tirza
says.
Now the
dynamic duo’s focus is on the “Loving Home”
series, in which each painting contains a
depiction of a home with a heart in the middle
of it.
“After about
a year and a half of doing the greeting cards,
she said, ‘Dada, I want to do a piece,’” Louis
says. “It’s a strawberry piece, and this is what
it has to say: ‘Strawberries are made of love,
and so is grandma, grandpa, mama, dada,’ and she
kept naming her friends. So I said, ‘Alright,
we’ll have a meeting tonight,’ and we sketched
together, we talked about the piece, we
shortened it, and now it’s in the gallery, and
it’s really
popular.”
One fan of
Tirza’s pieces is Flagstaff resident Amanda
Moore, who is also Tirza’s dance teacher. Moore
has purchased about a dozen works of art from
the store for herself and others, and she says
one of her favorites is the zebra piece, which
is part of Tirza’s collection and portrays a
loving heart home on the back of a colorful
zebra.
“They’re so
unique,” Moore says, “because they are father
and daughter, and then the simplicity of the
work as well as the thoughts that go into the
sayings and phrases they come up with are so
creative, and it’s truly from the
heart.”
Tirza has
gotten Louis to change words in the captions
before because she says she wants to keep her
phrases positive.
“I
want people to be happy,” Tirza says. “If the
words aren’t fun, I think people won’t buy
them.”
The typical
creation of a piece starts when Tirza draws a
sketch, which could happen anywhere from the
studio to a car on a Sedona road trip, when she
drafted a picture of pasta. Then she’ll tell her
dad to write down the caption—in this case, “I
live on some twiggly and wiggly pieces of
pasta.”
“It’s a
total collaboration,” Louis says. “I just keep
the continuity of my style, but she is fully
engaged in the
process.”
Not
everything is perfect through the creation,
though. Sometimes Tirza has some critical
remarks, but the finished project always seems
to turn out good.
“She gets upset sometimes that I don’t draw
exactly like her,” Louis says. “We butt heads.
There’s a lot of spirit going on
here.”
Louis says
they are continuing to produce works of art
together, though the store is currently filled
to the brim with art. Tirza has been so
instrumental in Louis’ work that he recently
changed the window of his store to read, “A
father and daughter art gallery,” in recognition
of the evident partnership.
“When we got to
nine pieces and realized it was 25 percent of
the inventory of the store, it just made sense
(to change the sign),” Louis says. “I was
talking to a friend the other day, and I
thought, ‘How long does it take for a lawyer to
become a partner?’ She’s been with me for four
years in my studio or this gallery for 20 hours
a week, and I figured, ‘OK, she earned
partnership.’”
For
more information on Tirza and Louis’ art, check
out www.my-art-place.com or call
928-
214-7144.
A collaboration between
Tirza and Louis Buchetto.
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