Born and raised in Charlotte, NC, Tori Bilas majored in visual art at Duke University and received her master’s degree from Wake Forest University. Tori’s life-long passions of art and animals merged when she started her art business as a teenager specializing in equine portraiture and other animal-inspired works while competing on the horse show circuit and spending her free time with the animals she loved so much. She knew going into college that she wanted ultimately to pursue a career as an artist, and she still finds it highly important to nurture professional development by both riding and painting as often as possible.

While animal portraiture is still a mainstay of her work, Tori often explores and plays with subjects from pop culture, food, and inanimate objects of comfort. Regardless of the subject matter, she pays close attention to line and value, but it is the details of expression, color, surface, and twinkle of an eye that capture the essence of her subject and the character and warmth of a personality. Her work is realistic yet soulful; traditional yet nuanced.

Tori’s work continues to grow in meaning, depth, and mechanics as she broadens her themes and explores new media, larger scales, and edgier compositions. Tori strives for excellence in all her work, and her hope is people will feel the same connections and tenderness for her subjects as they view her work as she does when she paints them.