Minggu, 12 Desember 2010

Still Life Painting is This Artist's Passion

By Roger Richardson


For one female artist, when she was younger she loved drawing horses as much as she loved riding them. That early training, combined with her many years of experience as an artist, has led her to a career painting horses and other subjects of the natural world. Horses, hens, reindeer and especially dogs can be seen in her pastel and watercolor paintings.

Her family came from Philadelphia and they moved to the present county when she was 11. Her sister and mother painted as a hobby just like her father who was a commercial artist. What is considered to be real important to an artist by her father is drawing. These are evident details in the structure of the animals she paints.

What she does is use cats and dogs as subjects since she loves painting animals. In their present home, she and her husband have a cat not to mention two dogs. Sometimes she also considers painting pets for private commissions.

Considering how light distinctly stands out in her paintings, this could be the bright white of daylight or the darker amber hues of evening. Considering her paintings, she cares a lot about having a sense of light. A reason for her preference of watercolor is this. The way she sees watercolor is as a series of transparent washes that can go over paper. White paper glows when the paint is applied. With the use of oil paint, there is another fashion in creating light. Letting light be revealed is a matter of painting everything around it.

What artists do when using watercolor is painting around what is white. Before adding the light, an artist using oil should first paint in the dark shadows. With her career, there is a desire from the artist to take on the challenge of luminosity in oil paintings. Considering her love for the impressionists, she wants to have some time to paint in oil.

Her move to the present location at the countryside from the former town is what inspires her nowadays. As she explores the back roads, she takes photographs of the old farmhouses and landscapes in the foothills. It worries her whenever there are old farmhouses that get torn down. When it comes to acknowledging and protecting the old houses, she feels the urgent need to paint them. The historic architecture matters a lot to her.

Another passion for this artist is creating still life paintings. What she does is subtly suggest texture and detail instead of painting realistically or with a photographic style. The focus for her paintings of pets includes the detail as well as the animal's facial expressions. She went to a known school of art and attended the Maryland institute college of art in Baltimore as well. What she did for much of her career was work as a nurse but she began painting professionally since age 25. What she did was establish her credentials as a painter through the years mostly in areas involving portraits, florals, pets, and architectural subjects. She is still a nurse for a day a week.




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