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DRAFTSWOMAN, MURALIST, RESEARCHER, COLOR SPECIALIST & ENTREPRENEUR.

   Nelly Rodriguez Lepe was born in Los Angeles California USA, of Peruvian father and Mexican mother and she is the oldest of four siblings.

   From childhood Nelly had an inclination towards drafting. Her artistic formation is mostly self-taught. Her early schooling was in the city of Lima, Peru, at the time, under a military regime.

   Her ex-military father, a radar operator, soon entrepreneur, owned travel agencies where he organized expeditions, sharing with his children the experiences of the exotic trips, thus creating an interest for the ancestral cultures. Her mother’s focus while in her youth was dancing, making her debut at the Teatro Degollado in the city of Guadalajara, México with world dances. Afterwards, she dedicated herself to be a homemaker and merchant.

   Nelly  began experimenting with art as a profesional at age thirteen, drawing and using color pencils, as well as any other substance like alcohol or other acids extracted from the chili pepper, which she herself prepared, using natural materials to blur and create different effects achieving a variety of tonalities on the colors laid on paper. She started her first enterprise at age 14, still in Junior High in Guadalajara, Jalisco, painting textiles and making cushions. Soon after, she started making comforters  and satin sheets hand painted with diverse images based in the Asian, Egyptian, Mayan,  Incan Empire and other cultures, making herself known as a creative painter in interior design.

   Her curiosity to find out how since prehistoric times, the early cultures discovered pigments, led her to the research and development of processes to obtain tints, oils, pastes, alcohols, etc. Master in paint techniques. She worked for 7 years for the Tri-Chem USA Company in Guadalajara, Jalisco, an international company specialized in quick dry oil paints for textiles, earning various acclaims at the national level for her novel techniques, not only applied to textiles as the company marked but showing the application in different surfaces. 

   At the same time, she volunteered at a non-profit organization, for special needs children, advising and teaching the children’s mothers on how to develop new family businesses thru hand crafts and teaching them to work with recycled materials to create articles for daily use.

   Nelly took on various study courses in Mexico, Canada and USA, learning to use diverse tools and materials. She opened up an art shop where she worked with ceramic pastes which she prepared herself and also started working in the dehydration and preservation of plants which were added to three dimensional art pieces and exported to USA and Canada.  She started up “Creativos Lepel” in 1992 and stood out as a female entrepreneur in her field having the largest variety of figurines in the nation, being fabricating in resins, fiberglass and polyurethane. Soon she added the manufacture of decorative candles, developing special paints to apply on wax and selling her own paint formulas, opening a bigger market for herself.

   Nelly managed interior design projects which utilized inclusions of stones, glass and other materials on paintings and murals, as well as furniture restoration and conversion.  In 2009 she was in charge of the rescue project of  “La Casa de la Cultura” in the city of  Tlaltenango, Zacatecas, Mexico, which it was demolished by a flood. She worked in the restoration of excavated pieces and woods dated from 1878 and in the “space utilization” project and distribution of art shops; also in 2009, in the state of Jalisco, she swear as Youth President  of “Partners of the Americas”, a non-profit organization created by former President John F. Kennedy for the support of the Latin American and Caribbean communities, charge that she vacated when she returned to her native country.    

   Presently she owns “Lepel  Design” specializing in Murals and Faux Finishes in Orange County, California. 

   She is also preparing her next collection to show at art galleries in which her new techniques highlight her knowledge in the use of the brush and different textures denoting nature’s colorfulness. 

   Nelly declares:

  “My inspiration for surrealistic or pictorial painting is derived of dreaming, both in the Alpha and Beta states that reflect Colorfulness, Harmony and the great Love that can be had to Human beings and Mother Nature. Vivid dreams that embodied as sentimental and visual reality in this third dimension, the same as...to see them, they transporting me and let me keep dreaming”