Tricia Higgins Hurt is the second-generation niece of Victor Higgins, American master painter and co-founder of New Mexico's renowned Taos Society of Artists.

She is one of the first women admitted to the University of Virginia where she received her undergraduate education. She studied art at the Worchester Art Museum School in New England and privately with Edward Lis, prominent Philadelphia painter and teacher.

Tricia received her first art lesson from her great-uncle Victor Higgins.

"Victor visited his brother (my grandfather with whom I lived) several times a year throughout the 1930s - and on one of his early trips, he brought me a box of crayons, the big newest box of 16 colors. He encouraged me to put aside my coloring book and showed me how to create my own pictures. This was the beginning of my art career."

Higgins continued to teach and influence Tricia throughout the 1930s and 40s until his untimely death in 1949 when Tricia was nineteen years old.

"In those early days, I remember Victor's arrival at our house in Charlottesville, Virginia with friends like Georgia O'Keefe and John Marin. These artists, destined for fame, filled our home with lively talk of the beauty and excitement of the Southwest which I was later to discover and embrace with my own paintings."

During her early career, Tricia's work centered in the Florida Keys and the mid-Atlantic states where she developed a following - especially among dignitaries and foreign embassies in Washington D.C.

"The highlight of my career was the purchase of one of my paintings by the Sultan of Oman who owns one of the world's premier art collections." Her work is internationally collected by patrons in Germany, France, England, Australia, Canada and Japan.

During the past two decades, Tricia's painting has been focused entirely in the Southwest where she has developed a national and international following.

Working in oil for the past thirty years, eclectic landscapes have emerged, composed with energetic brushwork and jewel-like colors, never too far from reality, yet bold and inventive.