ARTIST STATEMENT 1

ART IS JOY!

 I am a San Francisco Bay Area Acrylic and Watercolor artist, with a passion for color and the great outdoors. I live in the Sonoma Valley, where art, wine, food and nature provide a passport to happiness. As an artist, I am grateful to be surrounded by the magnificent and diverse landscape of Northern California, that provides an endless source of creative inspiration for me.

 I am at my happiest, when I'm outdoors, listening to my heart sing or painting the landscape in my studio! Every moment I'm not in nature, I'm thinking about it. This is what keeps me coming back to my studio day after day.

Nature is unpredictable, fleeting and ever-changing. My ambition is to capture the moment with photography, paint and canvas, before the memory fades. Through my artwork, I aim to bring the outside in, to enjoy at all times.  As you can see, nature is my biggest lure, muse and passion, behind every painting I create.

 

I call myself an abstract impressionist. I create expressive and colorful paintings of landscapes, flowers and color fields filled with flowers, that honor my love of nature, through canvas and paint. There is a fine line for me, between the control of realism and the freedom and unpredictability I feel, when painting abstracted art. I paint to express my emotional response to the beauty and power of nature's energy and spontaneity.

The images that form my work, are inspired from my adventures in the great outdoors. I then go back to my studio, look past the obvious and close my eyes to remember the feeling I had when I was at that location. I paint from a picture created by my memory, feelings and imagination, connecting me to that place in nature. I’m not distracted by the details; rather I embellish the feeling I have with rich colors, translucent layers, depth, and impasto texture, while blending in both realism and expressionism that brings an experience to life.

My aim is to tell a story of the landscape, that bursts onto the canvas with color, emotion, texture and movement. When I paint, I can feel the flowers swaying in the wind, smell their fragrance, see the shadows and light streaming across the trail, hear the waves crashing on the rugged rocks and can reach out and touch the scarlet sunset.

 

I work mostly in Acrylics, using Golden and Liquitex paints, gels and mediums because of their professional quality, heavy pigment, color strength, creamy consistency and coverage. I am a very square and flat person! I use mostly square canvases, starting with 12 x 12, up to 36 x 36, although I do venture into other sizes at times. I prefer flat, square and angled brushes to round brushes and I also love the effect I can get by using palette knives and spatulas.  

My process is to start applying color and markings onto the blank canvas without any rhyme or reason. At this point, I'm just having fun, getting loose and painting with wild abandon and color. The underpainting is done with drips and larger brushstrokes of color, colored, using big paintbrushes, spatulas, and palette knives. I then apply layer upon layer of color, with lots of texture, gels and glazes to add translucency and reveal the unexpected from each layer. Acrylic paint is the perfect medium for me ,because it is fast drying and allows me to paint with lots of layers, in a short amount of time. I also drip, dot, scratch, and then hone in on the details of the flowers or the landscape with smaller brushes, more refined brushstrokes and texture, when I am in the last stages of the painting.  

Some of my earlier work, was done solely in Watercolor and Gouache paint on Watercolor 140lb. or 300lb. paper. I still love to paint in watercolor because of its magical nature, unpredictability, translucency and the softness it creates. Acrylic paint can also be used with water to give it a more watercolor effect.



  Some of the greatest landscape painters of our time, where able to express and capture the light, color, form and texture in nature with distinctive and poetry-like brushstrokes, forms, shapes and swirling color that brought the landscape to life. Nature was the muse in the works of Ce'zanne, Monet, Van Gogh and Matisse'. Studying the age old genres and the way they looked beyond the rigid representational view of the landscape, has influenced my body of work today.  

 

FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS

I started down my creative path with a passion for art and color and it has now blossomed into my artist career today. Creating art has taught me to never give up on my dreams. It has taught me to slow down, savor the details and to live a life in full color.  For me, being an artist, has unlocked doors of courage and confidence, allowing me to follow my dreams and to have a job I love to do...PAINT!

The true wonder and magical beauty of the landscape is an inspiration to me everyday. My hope is that my artwork evokes a feeling of joy and inspiration for you.  As you immerse yourself into one of my paintings and feel an emotional connection of your own, then I have accomplished my goal.

 

ART IS JOY

-JEANNIE DOUGLAS