Regina Ottman

Regina Ottman has been creating art from the time she was a small child, even as she developed as a singer.  Her first music teachers discovered she has perfect pitch and synaesthesia (color-music).  While singing professionally and teaching voice lessons, she began working as a docent at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  

On retiring from stage/teaching, Ottman focused solely on visual art making.  Her drawings, paintings, prints and encaustics have appeared in juried and open shows throughout the Northeast, and her works hang in such varied private collections as the Cooper Cancer Center (Camden, NJ), the office of the president of Camden County College (Blackwood, NJ), a safe house for survivors of domestic violence operated by the Center for Family Services, and a community wall mural at Twisted Tatt2 (Camden, NJ) (the creation of which was featured on an episode of Spike TV's "Tattoo Rescue.")    Her musical training and synaesthesia now provide rich sources of imagery for her work, as do the flora and fauna of the natural world.  Ottman, an avid birder, reader and needle felting newbie, lives in historic Laurel Springs, NJ, with her spouse and their mustachioed cat, Emmy Noether. 

I am interested in the way opposites inform and balance each other, and I love to explore these relationships in my work. Vulnerability and resilience, fragility and durability, sorrow and comfort, community and singularity, story and secret:  these tensions are fascinating to me, and fuel my curiosity and my work.  The natural world is an endless source of inspiration and joy, as are every day objects and the stories behind them.

As an artist born with perfect pitch and synaesthesia, my ability to 'hear' colors is a rich source of inspiration.  I am currently working on a new series of abstracts based on different musical keys, tempi and moods.  Exploring varieties of musical palettes and finding textures to express audio ideas is exciting!  This series will allow me to play with many different media and techniques for quite some time!

-  Regina Ottman, 2024