“It is a big deal,” she says. “It’s about validation. Exposure. Opportunities.”

The first Edge Award (originally called the Emerging Artist Award) was given out by the Forward Arts Foundation in 2000 as a way to support Atlanta-based emerging artists and to nurture the city’s art scene. Winners are selected by a panel of Atlanta-based arts administrators, curators and artists.

“To some extent, it’s very much an award determined by your peers, and I think peer recognition for the work you do in your city is so essential to an emerging or under-recognized artist,” says Jacob O’Kelley, Swan Coach House Gallery creative director, who also manages the Edge Award.

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

For O’Kelley, Traverso’s award was well-deserved

“There’s something visceral in how she paints and displays her subject matter,” he says. “Swaths of textured paint with figures coming in and out of view cover her canvases very much in line with Francis Bacon and Cecily Brown’s works, with her distinctive take on her personal history. Her work often poses the question of ‘who am I’ while providing the viewer with moments of darkness that lead to bright patches of color and illuminated figures.”

Traverso currently has an exhibition called “No Te Alcanzan Los Ojos” at Whitespec, the project space attached to Inman Park’s Whitespace Gallery, through Aug. 5. Also in August, she will show as part of the newly established nomadic curatorial project Elsewhere created by former Wish Gallery curator Anna Akpele. Tentatively titled “Casita,” the inaugural project at Akpele’s project room Space One will examine Traverso’s time living in Washington, D.C., as a teenager.

“She’s really interesting,” says Whitespace owner Susan Bridges. “She has to paint. It’s a compulsion.”

Striking in a black tank, jeans, paint-flecked shoes and bolo tie, Traverso exudes self-confidence at her Murphy Rails Studios space, where stacks of paintings lean against the walls. Her bare arms are ornamented with graphic monochrome tattoos of the Washington, D.C., flag, a Chinese dragon and Archie comics slacker Jughead’s iconic crown. He was a favorite of Traverso’s growing up.

As she speaks about the themes of her work and her technique, she drops references to Oscar Wilde, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Patsy Cline, Nina Simone and Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie.

Sharing much in common with Ghenie’s swirling miasmas of paint and figures that come in and out of focus, as well as the way he conveys information with a minimum of visual cues, Traverso’s work is a compelling blend of personal history, painterly technique and mood. Producing one or two paintings a week, she tends to work in a subdued, melancholy palette of velvety browns, smoky grays and bilious yellows and greens. Her figures are partially obscured. They seem to emerge from a thick fog that shifts and floats around them, conjuring up the way memory works, as something imperfectly accessible.

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

Traverso had a globe-trotting childhood, living in China, Patagonia, Boston and Washington, D.C.

Her identity is manifold — a collage of early influences growing up around the world, her mother’s Argentinian heritage and her Hawaiian father’s Japanese and Chinese roots.

Her father was shrouded in mystery. It wasn’t until she was 26 that she met him. The man whose limbs are visible but whose face is obscured in Traverso’s oil painting on panel, “All the Dreams I Own,” is based on a photo of him.

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

Traverso’s mother Laura was an oil painter who attended the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in D.C. but who had to work multiple jobs to support them. Traverso grew up poor, she says, though there were always plenty of art books around for inspiration.

Some of her earliest memories are of China where her grandfather worked for UNICEF. She lived part time with her mother and part time with her maternal grandparents. “My grandparents helped raise me because my mom was young and going to school,” she says.

As a Spanish-speaking child with Asian features, Traverso was acutely aware of her exoticism for the Chinese people she met.

It was a life of “these two extremes,” she says. “I would be a totally different person if I hadn’t grown up that way.”

Traverso attended Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she studied film theory. The small liberal arts college with its pricey tuition and privileged student body was not always the best fit, she says.

“Socially, I was coming from a different place,” says Traverso.

In her second year of college she met an influential artist teaching at Sarah Lawrence, Angela Dufresne, who had a studio in Brooklyn and set Traverso on a different course.

Dufresne took her classes on field trips to New York City galleries and to visit artists’ studios, an experience that opened Traverso’s eyes to the potential of life as a contemporary artist.

“The first painting I ever made was a still life in that class,” she says.

You know how to paint already, she recalls Dufresne telling her. I think this is what you should do.

Credit: Will Crooks

Credit: Will Crooks

After a stint in Brooklyn, Traverso moved to Atlanta in 2016.

Painting for Traverso is a way to fully embody and engage in the moment. It’s when she’s painting that she feels most alive, often losing track of time in the studio.

“Wittgenstein said you can live forever in the present moment, and that for me is painting; being in the present moment,” she says.

“I’m so lucky that I am able to do this, you know. But it’s also something that I created for myself. I made this myself. I worked very hard to get here.”

ART EVENT

“No Te Alcanzan Los Ojos.” Through Aug. 5. Free. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Whitespec at Whitespace Gallery, 814 Edgewood Ave., Atlanta. 404-688-1892, whitespace814.com.

“Elsewhere: Casita.” August. Space One. For details go to instagram.com/else.where____.