Tereza Matos Hazelton was born in Brazil in the Northeastern State of Ceará and came to the United States in l965. She developed her love of art as a child, painting the local seascapes and fishermen in her home city. She then expanded her apprenticeship at the Academy of Art in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1979, where her love and talent for reproducing the human figure grew and took shape. At the Academy of Art, she learned how to utilize the 'old masters' techniques of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Velazquez, and Rembrandt, and now uses these techniques to reproduce ‘old masters’ paintings and also her own compositions. She has developed a unique talent for portraiture painting of the human form and shape.

Tereza follows Albert Munsel's method for color identification vocabulary when mixing colors, and to reduce the color intensity these are mixed with corresponding gray values. For portrait underpainting, she follows the Verdaccio method taught by Leonardo da Vinci. For outdoor scenes and painting of animals she follows the Grisaille and blue gray under painting method as taught by the French school.

Tereza has been teaching her craft for over ten years both nationally and internationally. She has given a series of seminars in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) and in her home city of Fortaleza, Ceará (Brazil), where she attracted over 100 students. Her workshops have been hosted in Brazil and Venezuela and she is among one of the few artists who have been given permission to teach inside the walls of the Louvre and of the Prado. In October 2000, Tereza took 10 of her students to the Louvre, Paris to work on reproducing the ‘old masters‘ of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

You can see more of Tereza's work here.