December Artist of the Month – Meet Bobbie Suratt

December Artist of the Month

Meet Bobbie Suratt

For Bobbie Suratt, art has always been a big part of her life. She majored in art at Ohio Wesleyan University and at that time focused on ceramics. She bought a kiln and a wheel and sold her works in local shows. When she and her husband had their children, Suratt realized that working in clay was not practical so she began quilting. She quilted for 30 years while raising her children in Weston, Connecticut. She also painted on and off during this time.

In the next phase of Suratt’s life, she lived abroad with her family. In the 1990’s, they lived in London where she studied portrait painting. Tokyo was next and after Tokyo, they moved to Manhattan for a year. “We lived right around the corner from the Art Students League of New York. I had decided a couple years before that I wanted to focus solely on painting. The classes at the Art Students League met, for the most part, every day. They were in portrait and figure, and some plein air landscape in Central Park in the summer. It was heaven!”

“Then we received a phone call letting us know that we would soon be grandparents of twins.”  They took the opportunity to move to the Boston area to be near their son and his growing family. Settling in Wellesley, Suratt created a lovely art studio on the third floor of their home. Living here, she was able to care for and enjoy both her parents (in Weston) and her grandchildren (in Wayland). The joy of family is evident in her paintings, many of which are of her loved ones. Shown here are exquisite paintings of her grandchildren.

 

Suratt keeps busy continuously learning. When she first moved to the Boston area, she studied at the MFA and then in Cambridge with Brett Gamache. She later found inspiration in many wonderful teachers, including Eli Cedrone and Jeanne Rosier Smith. She has done workshops with Eli Cedrone in Bermuda and Fiesole, Italy just outside of Florence and with Jeanne Rosier Smith working with pastels on the Amalfi Coast and in Little Compton, Rhode Island. She has also studied with John MacDonald on Cape Cod and Kathy Anderson in CT.

Recently Suratt has taken advantage of “classes all over the world,” one of the many silver linings of the pandemic. One interesting one was a self-portrait class with Zoey Frank of Colorado, and a floral class with Paul Foxton in the U.K. She is currently studying portrait and figure with Dominique Medici, who is teaching from Seattle.

Suratt is a valued member of the WSA where she has served on the Board and as past President for five years. She is also a member of the Needham Art Association and the Dedham Art Association. The profits from the sale of her paintings go to the support her favorite charities. One close to her heart is PEO International which focuses on providing educational opportunities for female students worldwide.

Suratt ends our interview with, “I love the act of painting but I’m also always striving to do better. I keep looking forward to my next painting and I think, ‘Maybe this one will be my masterpiece.”

Congratulations Nan Rumpf

Nancy Rumpf’s painting “Accumulations”  was selected and featured in the best of 2021 winter issue of Watercolor Artist magazine. The painting is acrylic and watercolor drip on paper (11×14). Congratulations Nan for this well deserved recognition. 

November Artist of the Month – Meet Jennifer Park

November Artist of the Month

Meet Jennifer Park

 

Artist, Jennifer Park, grew up in Gyeonju, South Korea during a period of economic decline for the country. From a very early age she loved to draw and paint and became well-known in her town for her artistic ability. She won many competitions and was encouraged by all who knew her to pursue an education in art. Park remarks, “I prepared for art school in high school but in South Korea you don’t send your portfolio to schools but rather have live competitions for admission.” She was accepted and completed art school at Keimyung University.

After graduation, in a worsening economy, Park was unable to find a job so she attended architecture school on scholarship. She was able to get only a part-time job in architecture and had many expenses which led her to start teaching students and painting for trade: both selling portraits and doing book illustrations. “The pay for illustrations was very low at the time and I finally had to get a ‘real job’ in a Korean bank. It was a very good learning experience.”

Park met her husband who is also an architect, married six months later and moved to the United States. “We share a love of museums and travel but after moving to America I became very isolated because my English was so bad that I couldn’t even order a coffee. Once again, life was very difficult. It took me six years to get a green card and 5 more years to get citizenship.” During that time, Park attended school in Brookline to study English and Art. “I took so many classes in art and drawing and, after getting my green card, I taught private art lessons to adults.”

The artist also got a license in Cosmetology and became a hair stylist but found that this did not satisfy her need to create. She and her husband have a daughter, now seven, and two years ago, she was forced to leave the workplace due to the COVID pandemic. This was the perfect opportunity to begin painting again and her goal is to be a full-time artist. She is now taking courses at Mass Bay Community College in Early Childhood Education with the hope of teaching art to children. She already enjoys drawing and painting with her daughter.

“I am focusing on oil painting and watercolor and I spend a lot of time drawing from sculptures at the MFA.” While she loves the Impressionists and the post-Impressionist work of Gaughin, she prefers to paint realistically. She would like to introduce us to her favortie Korean artists, hyper-realist painters Young-Sun Kim (https://www.facebook.com/100vun) and Jung-Hwan An (https://www.facebook.com/artduryan).

Park’s subject matter is evolving with her life experience. “I have always liked landscape, where nature and man-made buildings meet. Now my mind is changing a bit. I am very interested now in the faces of working-class people of different cultures, the passing of life that can be seen, and I am getting ready to start portrait work again.”

 

 

October Artist of the Month – Meet Michelle Lavallée

October Artist of the Month

Meet Michelle Lavallée

“Being With Nature”

In painting her art, Michelle Lavallée follows nature for inspiration. She explores captivating scenes to paint and create on canvas. Her paintings are made on location in the moment in time that the scene happens. Each work is a unique and original expression and interpretation. Also, her art is philosophical. It is a statement of being and the present moment of her person and nature.

When the artist is ready to begin a new search in nature, she drives her car, her studio on wheels, throughout the countryside and along rural roads where she lives. The effect of the falling light on the shapes of the fields, pastures, hills, trees, vegetation, rivers, houses, form the shadows and pictorial compositions. In witnessing the preferred scene in the morning, late afternoon and the hour of sunset, she finds the view that inspires her the most to create a painting.

In summary, Michelle Lavallée is an artist who searches and works to create beauty in her painting. What helps her in this direction are her studies en plein air of the infinite variety of the effects of light, color, value and tonalities that change around the shapes in nature. These observations help to enrich her artistic knowledge, imagination, creativity and passion in her landscape painting.

Her post graduate studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, lead to her obtaining a Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts. Preceeding this she held a B.A. with French Major from Rivier College. Also, she obtained the Art Specialist Certificate through the Boston University School of Education and Tufts University.

As a certified art specialist and teacher, she taught art to students of all ages and ability at the Boston Museum, Pilot School, l’Ecole Bilingue and the French Association of Cambridge, Nashua and Framingham Public School, Montrose School and others.

The artist’s work has been shown in over forty-five solo exhibits including at the James McNeill Whistler Museum in Lowell, the Copley Plaza, Middlesex Savings Bank, Sapas Exhibit in Wellesley, Dover Town Library, French Library Alliance Francaise of Boston, Musée Mauvide-Genest in Québec, Loring Coleman Gallery at Concord Art Association, Artifact Gallery in New York City and many others.

Her art has been exhibited in over a hundred group and juried shows, some of which include N.A.A. shows, WSA exhibits, Concord Art, Zullo Gallery, Boston Museum School, Art Expo – New York, Amsterdam Whitney Gallery – New York City, Southern Nevada Museum of Fine Arts, the Louvre Carrousel in Paris, the “In Arte Werkkunst” Gallery in Berlin. In Italy, her art was shown at Galleria Immagini Spazio Arte in Cremona, at MeArt in Palermo and at Palazzo Velli Expo in Rome. In Spain, her art was shown at the MEAM – the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona.

 

Sixteen publications have been written about her art. Her paintings are found in private art collections, in the U.S, Canada, Europe. She is a Charter Member of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Wellesley Society of Artists, Concord Art Association and Visual Art Explorer and Artrinet in France.

WSA Welcomes New Exhibiting Member Robert Savage

The WSA is happy to welcome Robert Savage as an exhibiting member. Bob is a retired a physician and he has turned his love of art into a new vocation as an art historian, lecturer/blogger, collector and now artist. He is eager to become involved with the WSA and we are thrilled he will be sharing his time and talent with us. To learn more about Bob’s art journey and see some of his artwork, visit his WSA artist page. Welcome to the WSA Bob!

September Artist of the Month – Meet Joanna Dole

September Artist of the Month 

Meet Joanna Dole

Joanna Dole grew up on a lake in Holliston with plenty of woodsy areas to make for a child artist’s paradise. “I drew and painted from a very early age. I was always drawing something… I won many first prizes at my church’s annual art shows. My mother also brought art and culture to the family. She brought us to the MFA to appreciate the impressionist painters she loved, to the ballet and musical performances…she made us handmade paper dolls and did portraits of us.  Dole attended Emmanuel College and started as a biology major. When she encountered an expansive array of art classes, she decided to switch her major, to her father’s chagrin and attained a Bachelor’s Degree in Art and Education. During college, she spent a semester studying Italian and fine art in Rome, Italy. “It was wonderful: we traveled in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and France as well as the entirety of Greece.  I developed a love of cooking while there as well as a love of Italy. I have traveled back there many times.”

After graduating, Dole took on the challenging work of a high school art teacher in the Boston City schools of Charlestown and Dorchester. While teaching, she took classes at Mass College of Art and Design where she received a Master’s Degree in both Art and Education. Teachers and mentors that have been important to her work are watercolorist of Maine, Paul George, Winslow Homer, Newton’s Wendy Artin, Anne Blair Brown of Nashville, and Roberto Zangarelli of Rome, Italy. She also emulates the works of Sargent and Homer

While still teaching, Dole moved to Wellesley and raised her three children. While mostly as a stay-at-home mom when they were young, she always continued creating art and joined the WSA. She took on projects painting furniture and walls, murals, frames, wall surfaces, and Trompe-l’oeil in her Decorative Painting business. She decorated the former Wellesley Inn restaurant with murals, worked in private homes and businesses, and contributed to decorator showhouses. These projects led her into the Interior Design business for the past twenty years. She developed her own business called Art and Design Solutions featured on Houzz.

Dole also has a love of portraiture, especially children, and has done commission work. She has won multiple awards, especially for portraiture, and has sold many paintings. Her first love is watercolor but she also uses water-soluble oils. With either medium, she is “not afraid of color and paint(s) vibrantly.” Up to this point, Dole’s work is mainly representational painting but “I am trying out looser and more abstract images now. In my portraits, I’ve always used a less-than-precise interpretation, allowing the paint to guide me.”

Dole ponders, “As I’m getting closer to retirement, I’m painting more for my own enjoyment. It gives me so much pleasure…it’s like a meditation.” She bought a house on a lake in Natick and enjoys the natural surroundings which are reminiscent of her childhood. She converted a screened porch into her studio and enjoys abundant wildlife; “I’ve seen a blue heron, bald eagle and in the winter there are otters.”She has been a long-time member of the WSA, North River Arts in Marshfield, and the Newton Watercolor Society. She had joined the Florida Keys Watercolor Society and served on the board there for 5 years, and the WSA.

August Artist of the Month – Meet Kate Heald

August Artist of the Month

Meet Kate Heald

 

Kate Heald grew up with her two sisters and two brothers in the country in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. “We did everything together and my parents gave us opportunities to try many activities. Something different stuck for each of us. For me, it was art, I’ve been a life long artist ever since I was a little one. It has always been my outlet.” Heald recalls her favorite gift ever was a big box of art supplies with various new papers, brushes, tools and mediums: “a menagerie of wonderful new things.” At Wheaton College she planned on majoring in chemistry or biology but was enthralled with her academic drawing course and considered biological illustration. She decided to go all in on art and graduated as a Studio major with a minor in Art History. She has taken classes at the MFA both during and after college.

 

After graduating, Heald looked for a job in the art world but soon realized that she could not support herself working at a gallery so took a corporate job at a technology research company, AMR Research, where she worked for eight years: she always painted on the side. “I have always left my art area set up, I like things neat and tidy so I can easily do something daily. If I don’t have time to work on a painting, I’ll make something small, like a card.” Heald married and became a busy stay-at-home mom for her 2 daughters for 19 years. She brought her skills to the volunteer circuit doing everything from room parent to CCD teacher to fundraiser. During this time, she did a lot of commission work and as her children got older began taking classes again.

 

Some of Heald’s most important mentors have been her professor and advisor in college, Vaino Kola and her first art teacher Margaret Kalousdian. Kalousdian “had such a compassionate and wonderful way of explaining things and she taught me to never skip any steps in my drawing to painting process. She had a cork cylinder and everyone new to her studio learned to draw it at their first class: These core principles really stuck.”  Watercolor also stuck for Heald: “I love the fast pace of (it), I don’t like to wait for other painting mediums to dry. Although I am a fairly controlled painter, the flow of watercolor allows for the unexpected.” Her subjects “are derived from things I love: beautiful flowers, landscapes, pets…something that catches my eye and brings me joy; I’m always saying, “Hang on, I have to take a picture

For the past several years Heald has been working for Caskata, a local company that sells beautiful dinnerware, glassware and linens for the tabletop. She initially started in the decorating studio where she decorated porcelain plates by hand. In the last year the company has outsourced this work due to the inability to source raw goods necessary to make the wares in-house. Heald’s role at the company has grown along with the company and they are just about to move their headquarters to the old Stuart Swan building in Wellesley.

Heald is an exhibiting member of the WSA and the Falmouth Artist Guild, where they also have a home. She exhibits at the Falmouth Art Center, West Falmouth Library and the South Shore Art Center. She treasures her group The Watercolor Connection in Natick: “It’s a wonderful group of artists (all women now); before the pandemic we met at St. Paul’s Church in Natick had lunch and painted together.” Heald has moved away from commission work and paints “mostly for myself: I try to bring out what initially caught my eye, something much more than what I see in the iPhone picture. The photo is never the same as what is in my eye.”

July Artist of the Month – Meet Lucy Sur

July Artist of the Month

Meet Lucy Sur

Lucy Sur grew up in Wellesley Hills and took art classes at Dana Hall and Bradford Junior College. She then went to UNH, where she majored in history and her practice of art was on the back burner until many years later. After graduating she worked for Kendall Company in packaging sales for 20 years, first in Boston and then in the New York City area. “I wasn’t creating any art, but I had easy access to all the museums in New York and I have always loved botanical art.”

Sur, who met her husband Steve during the Blizzard of 78, married and together they raised 2 sons in their lovely South Natick home surrounded by beautiful gardens. Sur got her teaching certificate when her children were growing up and taught preschool, as well as running a small summer day camp at her house.

When her boys left for college, Sur was ready for a new venture. The call to botanical art was still strong and she began studying with Friends of Wellesley College Botanic Gardens where she earned her certificate in Botanical Art and Illustration. “Learning to really look at my subjects with a far more observant eye is critical to the integrity of my artwork, and I continue to work on that skill.” She explains that in botanical art “the scientific principles must be correct.” She often shows her subjects in “various stages of their growing cycle; seeds, nuts, buds and leaves all capture what the particular plant is ‘about.’ And then the challenge is to make a beautiful piece of art by capturing the light and shadow, finding the right color mixes, and making an interesting composition.”

 

She continues to grow her art by participating in many workshops and has been inspired by scenes throughout New England and Hawaii, where her husband is grew up. “I’ve been fortunate to study with Elaine Searle and Anne-Marie Evans of France, Martin Allen of England, Denise Walser-Kohlar (vellum techniques), Carrie Meghan (graphite), as well as many others.” She is affiliated with both the American and the New England Societies of Botanical Artists, Friends of Wellesley College Botanical Gardens, Yarmouth Art Guild, Chatham Creative Arts Center, the Wellesley Society of Artists and the Wellesley Garden Study Group. Lucy immensely enjoys regular painting with a small group of fellow artists from early class days in the Wellesley certificate program. They call themselves “The Botanical Gourmets” and enjoy painting together, critiquing each other’s work…and savoring wonderful potluck lunches. She has participated in many shows with other NESBA artists as well as solo shows, including one at Heritage Gardens and Museum in Sandwich. She has sold both her watercolor and her acrylic and oil paintings to various buyers throughout the United States.

Sur’s botanical work often begins outside, where she does make sure to take photographs, then brings the specimen inside to achieve the lighting that is necessary for this intricate work. She starts with a basic line drawing, then a tonal drawing which she transfers to watercolor paper using a lightbox, then spends several weeks layering watercolor. Sur has also expanded her painting explorations to include acrylic and oil painting and she works much differently with these mediums; “I try to loosen up and focus more on the bigger picture and blocks of color in the composition to create a mood. I particularly like painting clouds and skies, trying to capture weather and a time of day.” She is able to switch gears but “not easily, it takes about a week to deescalate.” Her next goal is to modernize her botanical art and create larger pieces. “The shadows on a flower, the curve of a leaf, the twining of a vine all present opportunities to paint the forms and details of each subject, each with their own special beauty.”