Rima Tessman is a maker, painter and illustrator working with acrylic, gouache, watercolor, fabric and thread. When creating surface designs and patterns, she frequently works digitally or employs a combination of traditional and digital elements.

Rima's abstract works often feature stylized organic forms in acrylic, gouache, charcoal, and the occasional oil pastel. These multi-layered paintings, in which colors swish, blend and swirl, where vaguely anthropomorphic forms silently communicate, and where marks and icons are hidden, then uncovered, then hidden again, reflect a lifelong obsession with the unseen world that manifests itself through intuition, signs, symbols and emotions. Her figurative works tend toward the "naive folkloric" and are inspired by the motifs and traditions of her ancestral homeland of Lithuania, as well as early American colonial art.

Rima lives just outside of Cleveland, Ohio with her husband and two children and works from her spacious home studio.