Painting

My first experience with oils was in a high school art program and focused mostly on working from photographs, essentially drawing and coloring in with paint. It wasn’t until my intermediate painting class in undergraduate school that I started to have a break through in my approach to oil painting. A student in class was working with a rag and pulling out her composition from a loose mix of raw sienna paint and linseed oil. This was the first time I was exposed to this method and it turned out to be the method that works best for me. The process of pulling out highlights with a rag and pushing in dark areas with a brush allowed me to achieve a subtle glowing affect in my work, so much so that I rarely add white to my palette at all.

Later breakthroughs included my new found love for painting on gessoed masonite instead of bouncy stretched canvas. Another advantage to working on masonite is editing–I once took one of my paintings to my father-in-law’s workshop and had him cut two inches off the top to improve upon the composition.

My advanced painting course in undergrad taught me to finally put some emotion and personal feeling into my work. I would assume my other instructors along the way had these goals for their students, but for me, it didn’t click until I was a senior in college. So many of my courses just focused on skill building to the point when given a choice in subject matter, many of us were caught like a deer in headlights. Ultimately, this helps in my role as a teacher. The basic skills will always be important, but finding opportunities for students to use art as expression is equally as important.

Below are examples of my work in oils. As with most non-digital art pieces, the quality seen on the website is not indicative of how the work looks in real life.