As a child of eight or nine years old, Serena Bates started her journey of exploration and interpretation of the world around her  through art. Beginning with pencil and paper sketches, Serena went on to explore a variety of media, including charcoal, pastel, and oil and acrylic paint, as she depicted landscapes, flowers, and animals. As a young adult, she studied traditional figure painting and anatomy at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design.

 Upon discovering the joy of working with clay, Serena found her passion for sculpting portraits – busts and full figures, both serious and whimsical – and all sorts of critters with lots of personality: barnyard animals, domestic ones, and increasingly over time, marine animals. She added working with bronze and stone to her repertoire. Many years of observing animals in nature, at home, and in her job at the Mystic Aquarium, helped Serena develop her non-traditional approach to sculpting. Rather than taking measurements, Serena trusts her observations, intuition and connection to the stories of the people and animals she portrays, producing a “Wabi-Sabi” effect, Japanese for perfectly imperfect.

 “Stories are what define my work, what drive my vision, what inspire my hands…my life,” she says. The stories-turned- sculptures range from a clay ‘White Rabbit staring down to the bottom of a log, looking for Alice;’  to bronze ‘Three Stooges’ fountainheads squirting water from pursed lips; to alabaster octopi and mermaids at play and at rest. This approach has proven successful, with Serena’s sculptures shown in nationally-known exhibitions and galleries across the United States and Canada. She has won more than 70 awards and honors during her career. In the last five years alone, she has won more than 20 prestigious awards from the American Artists Professional League, Allied Artists of America, the Salmagundi Club, the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Club, the Academic Artist Association, and Mystic Museum of Art, to name a few. The artist is also a member of the American Society of Marine Artists, Allied Artists of America, American Artists Professional League, and the Salmagundi Club.