Upon graduating with Honors from the Academy of Art University of San Francisco with a cooperative degree in Fashion Illustration, Thalia Stratton owned and operated her own design studio from 1990.
She landed her first teaching job around the same time she graduated and is still teaching part-time at San Francisco State University.

After free-lancing in the advertising world for many years, including working for clients such as, Givenchy-Paris, Neiman Marcus, I. Magnin andCo., Playboy Enterprises and the San Francisco Ballet, she also produced product lines for the Gift Market and the Wine industry of Napa and Sonoma Valley.

In the late nineties, Thalia decided to approach the Fine Art market and began selling her illustrations and paintings to small galleries and local art collectors. She is currently a member of several prestigious Pastel Societies and the Oil Painter’s of America. She has been published in numerous publications including, Gentry Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and American Art Collector.
She has won many awards, including the LGAA Curator’s Award 2009.
Trained as an illustrator, she is naturally drawn to narrative and to using her work to suggest a story.
Her process begins as recording a specific moment at a specific place, and then transforming it into a fictional scene in order to create a powerful and distinct mood. Thalia’s approach to color and light is in the forefront of her style, and is the main contribution to this transformation into mood: a limited palette of muted, sophisticated darks, minimal intensity, subtle values, along with the clarity of white to indicate how light plays off forms and seems to intensify darkness.
Thalia wants viewers to feel so welcomed into the scene that they can create their own story of sense of place, and even imagined memories of what may have happened then and there.
Whether indicating backlighting, the warm soft glow of a quiet interior or
tracing fleeting streams of light to achieve a dramatic effect, Thalia strives
for a timeless transformation from the everyday moment.

Thalia creates a window into a visual dialogue with the viewer’s boundless imagination.