Born in Missouri in 1952, Ronald DeWitt Mills (later Mills-Pinyas) lived the first two years of his life in Germany and later in New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, Illinois, Missouri and Kansas. He moved to California in 1970 for his education, later moving to Oregon in 1979 to continue an artistic and teaching career.
Along with Costa Rican ethnomusicologist Dr. Jorge Luis Acevedo, Ron formed CEDIA, a research organization and ethnological collection attending to tribal cultural arts and shamanism among various threatened tribal groups in Central America (Cabécar, Bribri, Térraba, Maleku, Boruca). CEDIA has collaborated through lectures and loans to domestic and international museums. The Mills-Acevedo CEDIA collection and archives are located in Santa Ana, Costa Rica.
Ron served as Professor of Studio Art for forty years at Linfield College in McMinnville, OR, and is now Professor Emeritus of Studio Art at Linfield. Married to María Isabel Pinyas-Mills, Isabel and Ron have made their homes and studios in the Eola Hills in Oregon's wine country, in Portland, Oregon and in Arenys de Mar, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Ron has three sons and three grandchildren. Ron's interests include hiking, particularly along the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
"The COVID situation casts an existential, touchless, sometimes troubling light on the identity and relationship of individuals to one another; to relationships within families; to relationships within nations, all of which challenges us anew to define a more inclusive personal and global culture. As a painter I seek to form a wider aesthetic context in which adjacency and unity is found in the aggregate; in what carries over panel to panel through gestures; though what bridges across boundaries with color and texture; about how luminosity exposes the depths of darkness."
