Portraits and an Artist Working with Still Life

When a female artist was a child back then, she loved drawing horses as much as she loved riding them. She has many years of experience as an artist and early training that eventually led her to a career involving 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. Aside from her father who was a commercial artist, also painting as a hobby were her mother and sister. According to her father, what is real important to an artist is drawing. Considering the structure of the animals she paints, these details are evident.

As she paints animals, her love of doing so expanded this to include dogs and cats. Not only do they have a cat but she and husband have two dogs in their present home too. Painting pets for private commissions is something she also does.

Considering how light distinctly stands out in her paintings, this could be the bright white of daylight or the darker amber hues of evening. Being able to have a sense of light in her paintings is what she cares a lot about. One reason behind her preference for watercolor is this. Going over pieces of paper when it comes to watercolor is a series of transparent washes. Applying the paint gives vibrance to a piece of white paper. Using oil paint means creating light in another fashion. Revealing light is a matter of painting everything around it.

Artists that use watercolor should apply the logic of painting around the white. For artists using oil, adding the light comes after they have painted in the dark shadows. When it comes to challenges in her career, the artist wants to take on luminosity in oil paintings at some point. Having some time painting in oil is what she would like considering how she loves the impressionists.

What inspires her today is her move from the former town to the present location at the countryside. Photographs of the old farmhouses and landscapes in the foothills are taken as she explores the back roads. When the old farmhouses get torn down, she usually worries. To acknowledge and protect the old houses, she feels that there is an urgent need to paint them. The historic architecture matters a lot to her.

This is one artist who is also passionate about still life paintings. She suggests texture and detail with subtlety instead of painting with a photographic style or with realism. The detail as well as the animal's facial expressions are the focuses of her paintings of pets. She attended a known school of fine art and the Maryland institute college of art in Baltimore. Since age 25 she was already painting professionally even if she worked as a nurse for much of her career. What she did was establish her credentials as a painter through the years mostly in areas involving portraits, florals, pets, and architectural subjects. It is per given week that she works as a nurse for a day.

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