Sandra Brestel was born in California, and she has lived all of her adult life in Tucson, Arizona. It is here in the southwestern desert, that she finds a continuing source of inspiration for her unique style of painting.

Sandra is primarily a self-taught artist. Over the years, her natural artistic progression has earned her through several mediums and styles. Her art career has traversed through successes 111 mural painting, graphic designs, and better known as an award winning color pencil artist Sandra's style was very labor-intensive- Using techniques of burnishing and layering of colors, she created highly photo realistic artwork. These same labor-intensive techniques and her amazing sense of color and composition, is the foundation of Sandra's wonderful acrylic paintings today.

Many artists go through phases of development before they find what there soul is at peace with. Sandra has found this inner artistic peace in the petroglyphs and pictographs of ancient Native Americans. These ancient people left the traces of their lives upon earth" a architecture of rock and these enduring images are a testimony of their need to communicate. Rock art was not produced as just an artistic expression but as a part of ritualistic, spiritual, and social concerns, that were a major part of life. Many petroglyph symbols and images remain a mystery to us. Thousands of years ago when ancient artist- shamans pecked, scratched, and painted these images. They did not leave us an explanation as to their meaning. It is clear only the artist knew the meaning of certain images. Today each one of us interprets these sacred images differently within our own spiritual being.

Each original piece starts with a well-crafted irregular shaped wood panel. These panels arc the ground on which Sandra performs her distinctive style of acrylic paintings. With her ability to blend color, shape, and texture, Sandra creates the illusion of an actual cave wall or cliff face. Within this illusion of rock lies a composition of anthropomorphic symbols and shapes. The images portrayed in Sandra's paintings are based on authentic petroglyphs. Using her artistic license, Sandra paints these images in her own composition. This enables her to create freely a hypothetical and researched theme in each other pieces. The mirage like appearance of these sacred images is what brings her paintings to life.