Hilda Janzen Goertzen, a self-taught artist, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  It was here that her interest in movement, music and art was fostered.  In 1998 she began painting acrylics on canvas and found that she enjoyed this medium the best.  It is in the large abstracts where she is able to express her deepest emotions by swirling, pushing and pulling paint across the canvas with brushes and palette knives.  Her paintings are often highly textured which she achieves by adding cement, sand, flakes, or gel to her paints.  Hilda's art has been described as being eclectic, full of movement and colour, each piece representing the joy and energy of life. 

Her most recent interest has been in researching her family genealogy and the stories of those, including her relatives, who spent time in the Russian Gulag.  As a result she has done a series of paintings focusing on the suffering of the Mennonites in Stalinist Russia. Hilda's father, Johann Jacob Janzen, at the age of eighteen, together with three of his friends, escaped from Hierschau, Molotchna, Russia by crossing the Amur River into China in the winter of 1930. Hilda's mother with her nine siblings and her widowed mother Susanna Dück Janzen, fled from Omsk, Siberia, through Moscow to Paraguay in 1929.

Hilda resides in Rosedale, BC with her husband Peter. They have two grown children, Michael and Andrea, son-in-law Byron Neufeld and two grandchildren, Zachary and Caleb.

To view more of Hilda's art go to: www.hildagoertzen.com