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Christy Diniz Liffman, the Brazilian-born artist whose paintings are “memoryscapes” of her life and travels, sits down with 225 to share the influences and experiences that have helped shape her work (dinizliffmann.com).

Your family is active in the arts. Did you always feel a pull to be an artist?

Absolutely. My Brazilian grandmother was a professional artist. It was something I grew up appreciating and being exposed to on a number of levels, not only her own work but also living in a home with beautiful art pieces. We’d go to her farm on the weekends , and that is where she would come up with these crazy projects. She’d decide she wanted to paint tiles for the bottom of the swimming pool, so she would have my grandfather build a kiln, and we would go and dig up clay. It was really a hands-on experience.

The Diniz name is pretty prominent in the Baton Rouge art community, particularly you and your brother, Paulo. I noticed you sign all of your work Diniz Liffmann. How important was it to keep your maiden name?

Extremely important. Early on I decided that was how I would sign all of my work. I even gave my daughter Diniz as a middle name.

You recently studied with the Chinese painter Wan Ding and took a trip to China. How has this affected your art and the way you approach it?

I’ve always been interested in Asian art, but I’ve never had the opportunity to study it formally in school, so when the opportunity presented itself to take Wan Ding’s class at LSU, I took full advantage of it, not dreaming that I was going to be so taken with the whole process, which was challenging but very meditative. It’s sort of in-line with the way I’ve been heading. In the last 10 years or so, I’ve become more introspective and spiritual.

Studying under such a master must have been incredible.

It was such a whole-body experience. In the mornings we woke up and did tai chi, then we would eat breakfast and spend the day doing calligraphy or painting or carving these little stamps with Chinese symbols. Nothing was separate. One thing flowed into the other. It was so quiet and peaceful. In terms of my art, I’ll never be able to look at things as I did before.

Many of your earlier works and your recent series entitled Silk Road depict a fascination with trees. What’s with the trees?

They provide a sense of stability and peace, a connectedness to the earth. The trees in China, though, are a whole different story. They are revered and protected by the government. All of the ancient trees are numbered. They carry tags. If you had a tree in your yard that was uprooting your house and your house was splitting in two—too bad. The tree stays. It was really incredible to see them so honored. The majority of the ones I saw were very, very, very old were in Buddhist temples. So, obviously they have always been put in a place of importance.

The Silk Road series is done entirely in encaustic. Why that particular medium?

I just love it. My first encounter with encaustics was in 1964. I was visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I was 16 and I remember standing in front of a portrait of a young boy with these big, brown, liquidey eyes. It looked like it had just been painted. It was so beautiful, the surface, everything.