Artist of the month with a difference!

Firstly I would like to let you all know that I will be painting at Boynton House from 10am until 4pm tomorrow for the 'Doors Open' event. Feel free to come and watch or chat with me about painting in watercolour.

For those of you that were not at the meeting last night I would also like to let you know that my painting 'Baby on Board' has won the John Singer Sargent Award at the Transparent Watercolor Society of America Exhibition. This is a big award and a huge honor. As you can imagine I am very excited :)

Lastly I expect you are all wondering where our artist of the month is. Well, for this month I thought we should celebrate our own fabulous artists and provide an opportunity to showcase our Luminosity award winners. So over the next month I will be asking each award winner to write a small piece about themselves that I can post here on our blog. If you were an award winner please e mail me.

So here is mine :)

I started painting in watercolour seriously in 2008. I had painted a couple of paintings before as a child but had mostly worked in pen and ink. 

I  had a passion for art though for as long as I can remember. When I was small I would go with my mum to drama festivals. She would give me pencils and a sketch pad to keep me amused. I would get lost in a colourful imaginative world where a simple scribble could become a tree, a few shapes a friendly giant and a triangle a mountain far on the eastern horizon. My mum would tell me three objects and I would use them to create a story in my mind and then illustrate it on the paper.

Things didn’t always go to plan though. Once, when I was about three years old I was with my mum in a very old Victorian theatre with a sloped floor. I dropped my pencils in the middle of a very serious and tragic scene on stage. The pencils rattled noisily on the wooden floor all the way from the back of the theatre where I was sat, to the front of the stage. As they rolled clattered and everyone bent their heads to see what the noise was. It looked like an inverted Mexican wave :)

I guess I was destined to be noticed as an artist! Having a career, getting married and raising a family and then moving to Canada though took up my life but I always knew deep down that something was missing. For me, art is a way to communicate so much that is so hard to put into words… a way to see beyond the outer appearances of the things and people around us and into the soul of the subject whether that be a person, animal, or landscape.

 My experience working in Special Education helped me to develop a strong understanding of how feelings, emotion and knowledge can be communicated visually.  I draw on this when creating art, whatever the subject matter, painting in essence, the emotions of life. I use transparent watercolour to build shape, form and create atmosphere. 

Colour palette is very important to me in helping to create this ‘soul’ in a painting. I enjoy the subtleties of glazing to build shape and form and develop the colours I feel best convey the atmosphere I am after.

I am having an amazing year so far and a lot of my local success is due to BWS so thank you all for your friendship and support and for all the opportunities this society has provided me and the doors it has opened for me too. 

BWS is the Best!

Ona