Aimee Trayser

Inspired by nature and what she sees in her dreams, St. John artist Aimee Trayser's works almost always include a sun or a moon. "The orb is the circular image that allows completion," she says.

Many of her works are collages created by adding materials such as gel glosses, marble dust, glass beads and more to textured acrylic. She also paints with oils at her studio in Coral Bay.

Trayser, 61, always dabbled in art. As a child growing up in St. Louis, Mo., she sketched and doodled. She initially studied to be an elementary school teacher, but dropped out after -becoming disillusioned with the public school system.

It was the 1960s, and like many others, she headed to California. Trayser had her first taste of commercial success while living in Berkeley, when she sold a simple landscape with a smiling moon to a neighbor who paid her several hundred dollars.

After a stint on the Hawaiian island of Maui, where she began creating oil paintings and started an herbal cosmetic company, she signed on to be part of a boat crew. This led her back to California, where she studied briefly at the Laguna College of Art. "It stifled me," she says of her classes at the art college. "My brain was filled with all of these rules. It was thwarting me."

She sampled Caribbean life during a boat delivery to the French West Indies. She stayed several years on St. Maarten and St. Bart's, where she sold sarongs she had painted aboard the boat.

While living in Newport, R.I., Trayser met a woman who owned a house on St. John. In 1982, she moved to the island to spend five years as the villa's caretaker.

Meanwhile, she met her husband-to-be, St. John builder Fred Trayser, and the two married and had a son, Matty.

Her art career began to flourish, so she and two other St. John artists renovated what had been a storage room at Mongoose Junction shopping center and turned it into Bajo El Sol Gallery. Her work is still available at Bajo El Sol and at Gallery St. Thomas in St. Thomas' Charlotte Amalie shopping district.

As for the future, she'd like to keep a base on St. John, but she and her husband plan to travel. "I'm eager to explore the world," she says. "I'd like to take off with a sketch book and paints."