About Michele Faia
She moved to Santa Cruz in junior high school and later attended Cabrillo College and San Jose State University, earning bachelor's and master’s degrees in art. Because she thought she wasn’t an artist and couldn’t do art she majored in art history and began her career as a community college art history instructor. She realized early on that she wanted to make art, not just talk about it. Michele now paints, mostly mandalas, teaches watercolor mandala classes and loves to tell anyone who will listen about the passion she has for mandalas. She lives on the Monterey Bay with her husband, Don Faia, who is also an artist. The first time she saw him he was wearing jeans and cowboy boots – it was love at first sight! Don designed her recently published book Art In My Heart; The Power of Watercolor Mandala Making.
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What she says...I spent most of my life wondering what I was supposed to be doing, and then I found mandalas. I discovered them when I had been diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and used them in my healing. I had suffered from such loneliness and depression when I was young and it was wonderful to find a tool to help me work through this. I see mandalas as a record of a journey to one’s heart, to one’s inner light and a kind of diagram to peace and happiness. Mandalas helped me with another powerful journey when the results of a biopsy I had on 9/11 proved to be cancer. Most of the mandalas you see here, which are a record of the inner visions I had of flowers and nature, are from that period of healing. Painting mandalas, working inside the sacred circles, changed my life forever. I am happy to say that I am now well and thriving. I feel fortunate to be able to share these visions with you and to teach others what I have learned about this amazing and powerful tool. |
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Michele grew up in the small rural community of Oakdale, California. Her vision of her future was to marry a cowboy.