About Myla

Myla Holzman Kato, a native Californian, has spent most of her life within sight of the Pacific Ocean. She was born in Santa Monica in 1963 and became a full-time artist by 1993.

Myla's parents often took her, and her sister Lisa, to exhibits at Los Angeles museum, gallery openings and performing arts concerts, instilling appreciation and passion for the arts and culture. Not a month went by without car camping in the deserts of California, hunting fossils in the arroyos of Baja, California, or backpacking in the Sierra Nevada or Los Padres Mountains. Myla's Mother, Bea, an RN at UCLA, and an avid photographer, spent hours in her darkroom in their family house; her father, Herb, transferred his excitement about the West's dramatic physical geography to his daughters, and often lamented not having become a professor of Geography instead of an aerospace engineer.

Myla was a life drawing and painting student at the Brentwood Art Center from the early ages of 13 to 17. Under the tutelage of director/teacher Ed Buttwinick, Myla developed an eye for capturing, on paper and canvas, the movement and flow of live models. She spent a year of that time experimenting with oil and acrylic painting, and then returned to her favorite mediums of conté crayon and charcoal.

After working and traveling through New Mexico and Colorado, she returned to Santa Barbara in 1990 to finish school. She graduated with honors from Santa Barbara City College with a degree in Graphic Communications and Design. The first half of her studies involved, the now rare technique, of chemically burning plates and using a 4-color printing press for reproduction. For the last half of her studies at SBCC, everything went digital.

Taking advantage of learning from some of California and Santa Barbara's talented art teachers, Myla has been able to nurture and further develop her skill as an artist. Her landscape and figurative work are bold, colorful and inventive. She always takes a turn away from realism, and lands with her own twist on the subject at hand. When her artwork reaches a point that feels exciting and interesting to her, then it's done.

She values her weekly "paint outs" with other plein air painters, as well as her ongoing sessions with a devoted group of artists for figure drawing. She loves spending ample hours in her studio when possible, along with her yellow lab, Xena.

Current Works

Myla’s newest work can be seen on Facebook and Instagram.

She also shows new works every November for Santa Barbara’s annual Mesa Artists Studio Tour.

For inquiries and studio visits, please email myla@mylakatofineart.com or call (805) 637-5999.

Affiliations

Southern California Artists Painting for the Environment (S.C.A.P.E.)
Mesa Artists Studio Tour (M.A.S.T.)
California Art Club (C.A.C.) Associate Artist
Santa Barbara Art Association (S.B.A.A.)

Exhibitions, Juried Shows, Invitationals and Awards can be furnished upon request.