About the art work of Valucha
Valucha didn’t like labels but, when pressed to describe her style, she would call herself a “not so naïve primitive.”
She came to painting relatively late in life after many years of devoting herself to her music. Although always attracted to art, she shied away from it because of an unpleasant childhood experience with an art teacher. He wanted everyone to paint within the lines in predictable forms. Valucha was neither linear nor predictable.
She took up painting in the early 1980’s, around the time that she and Jill bought a little Sears Roebuck house as a vacation getaway in New Buffalo, Michigan, 90 miles from Chicago.
There, in the peace and quiet of the country, she began to her “Bahianas,” the black women of Salvador, Bahia in the northeast of Brazil. They were known for their white lace dresses, colorful “pano da costa” sashes and beads and Valucha painted a Bahiana series, with blue, yellow and red backgrounds, hanging rosaries on some of the frames. Her earliest works were done in acrylic. As she experimented and learned more she moved to oil. Her paintings became more dense, 
saturated and expressionistic. She also studied the use of oil pastels and it is with these materials that she did some of her freest and most robust work.
Valucha loved to sketch and she has scores of line drawings depicting characters out of her imagination including angels who smoke cigarettes. We are still digitizing these images and will put them on the website when they are ready.
Valucha displayed her work at art shows in the Midwest and in Washington, D.C. Her paintings are held in private collections.