Like her sculptural enamel paintings, which all but explode off the brick walls at Palms Bistro Bar in Milwaukee’s Third Ward, Phyllis Toburen is always evolving. Her drive to break through to what’s next in her creative life invigorates her work with a spirit of transformation.

"I don’t want to do anything that isn’t honest, spontaneous; it mirrors who I am," Toburen says. "I don’t want to do anything that’s been done before."

Her pursuit of the original has driven Toburen’s career, both as a fashion designer and now as an internationally acclaimed artist.

She never took an art class in high school, and studied history at UW-Milwaukee in the late 1960s. Although she loves history, she says the urge to express herself creatively led her to go on to study fiber arts.

"You have to follow your gift. You don’t have a choice if you want to be happy," she says.

Toburen was just two credits short of a degree at Mount Mary College when she packed up her original knitwear in a bag, headed to Chicago and sold her first work. She started out doing trunk shows in Milwaukee and built up her business until she had a following and, at one point, 35 employees.

Her last show was at the home of country music stars Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter in Nashville, at Colter’s invitation. Colter had been a fan of Toburen’s work since the mid-1980s, when she saw a photo of a dress worn by WISN-TV personality Liz Ayers at the re-opening of the Riverside Theater. The red dress, created by Toburen, was embellished with 10,000 pearls.

She modified the dress for Colter, who wore it at the first Farm Aid concert. Later, Toburen sold an original design to country legend June Carter Cash as well.

Although she occasionally painted on the fabrics she used in her fashion designs, Toburen says, she didn’t take her first painting class until 1995, when she enrolled in a course at Milwaukee’s War Memorial.

"My first paintings were of faces, which I thought was the hardest thing in the world to do," she says.

One of those faces was her own, but she didn’t realize it until her instructor pointed out the resemblance. That self-portrait was reproduced on the back cover of "New Art International," distributed worldwide by Barnes & Noble, along with 10 pages of her work featured in the interior of the publication.

Toburen considers her second painting instructor, Kyle Zubatsky of the Tall Tree Gallery in Thiensville, to be her mentor. When Toburen began throwing paint at a canvas in Zubatsky’s class, Zubatsky introduced her to the other students as an "abstract expressionist."

"As I transitioned from a fiber artist, my first paintings had fiber under them," Toburen says. "Then they started cracking. They were very organic, and from that they started rising on their own to become sculptural."

"The rising," as Toburen calls it, is what makes her pieces unique. At her home studio in Mequon, she begins by choosing the classic rock music that she considers intimately connected to her process. The next step is mixing her own pigments, which can take up to 12 hours. There is no preconceived idea of the final piece, she says. "The music is my muse. I just work with the music and let it flow." Her process requires the application of layer upon layer of acrylics.

"Some pieces take four to six months to cure, and sometimes they take three to four years before I get them to what I feel to be right, because I’m a perfectionist," she says.

When she is satisfied that the painting has balance and can be appreciated from every angle, she applies a clear UV coating. That final step makes the painting begin to crack and take on a life of its own. Sometimes, the center of the work rises up like a flower unfolding its petals, or the cracking produces organic forms that resemble creatures from the sea, or ancient tooled leather. The coating protects the paintings from damage, and can make them look like ceramic tile or glass. She says the paintings will continue to crack and change slowly as they age, constantly revealing the layers underneath.

Toburen invented the process, and debuted the work at a 2004 Gallery Night in a Third Ward space she had found just three weeks prior to the event.

At one point in the evening, Toburen experienced a bit of déjà vu. She says she realized she was just steps away from what now is the Milwaukee Public Market. At one time, the market had been the site of her grandfather’s business. Both of her grandfathers, she says, had thriving distribution companies that began decades ago in the Third Ward.

Since that 2004 debut, Toburen’s work has been sought out by serious collectors and honored at juried shows and in art publications globally. She recently was accepted into the prestigious National Association of Women Artists, which counts Mary Cassatt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Judy Chicago among its inductees.

Toburen’s latest project is producing close-up photographs of her paintings, which reveal even more dimension to the work.

"I’m always trying to do something different and that’s very, very important to me," Toburen says. "I want my art to be something different for everybody, because you want (viewers) to access their own personal experiences, and I want there to be a lot of space for somebody to interpret it."