Award-winning artist and educator Debra Fitzsimmons has a message that speaks through her remarkably expressive artwork. Using oil and mixed media, Fitzsimmons casts a spell on our attention, drawing us in with mysterious scenes of fractured faces and figures portending great significance. These powerful events and characters exist against a baroque surrealist landscape, as if the artist is weaving a modern mythology. Her paintings deal with social and political issues in an allegorical manner. Co-opting symbols is one of the important methods used to produce the defining narrative in each piece. Fitzsimmons employs iconic images of innocence, freedom, or wealth and then flips our preexisting ideas on their heads to create a new, foreboding, or even sinister response. Her compositions are fascinating and introspective, giving audiences pause as they decipher the complex meanings for themselves. We explore themes of individuality, motherhood, politics, and collective conscience. Her aim is to spur people “to think about social issues more systematically,” she explains, “to consider repercussions of choices… with thoughtful, civil, discourse.” Debra Fitzsimmons lives in Mundelein, IL.