The WSA is happy to welcome new exhibiting member Jacob Mazurek. He is an accomplished self taught artist whose extensive travels lend themselves to a lifetime of painting inspiration. Jacob’s highly rendered subject matter is rich and varied. To see more of his work, visit his WSA artist page.
Welcome to the Wellesley Society of Artists Jacob!
January Artist Spotlight
Meet Andrea Rex
Andrea Rex likes to paint from life, mainly in oils. She also enjoys printmaking and is exploring acrylics. Born in Illinois, she grew up in Syracuse, New York and moved to the Boston area in 1970. She studied biology at Stony Brook University on Long Island, and eventually got her PhD in Environmental Sciences at UMass Boston.
TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND
When I was a little kid, I spent many hours drawing little stick figures, making paper dolls with large elaborate wardrobes, went through a long obsession of drawing horses, also building dioramas in my bedroom from models of dinosaur skeletons lit with flashlights. (Installations!) I took paints outdoors and painted landscapes. When I was about 12, my parents were kind enough to send me to Saturday morning painting classes at the Everson Museum in downtown Syracuse, where we would go out into the city, draw what we saw, and bring them back to class to paint. I continued with classes at the Museum throughout high school, mostly still life and portrait drawing.
I didn’t choose to try to make a living as an artist (it seemed too hard!) and instead opted for my other love–the natural sciences. Eventually I ended up working on the Boston Harbor Project studying the effects of pollution and the environmental recovery of the Harbor. But throughout my life I have always kept my hand in the arts, taking classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Mass College of Art, and other places.
Now that I’m retired, I have the luxury of renting studio space and have the time to pursue painting more intensively.
WHAT DO YOU PAINT and WHAT IS YOUR PROCESS?
When I think about it, the subjects of my painting haven’t changed much since I was small–I’m not really sure what that says about me. I paint outdoors, still life, people. I like to work from direct observation and only use photographs if there’s no other way to study a subject. Although I love to look at abstract works, I personally seem to need to have the stimulus of something real to look at to get started on a painting. There’s something innately interesting about translating the 3D world onto a flat plane.
I spend quite a lot of time setting up still lifes, and have recently painted a series of old bottles dug up from my backyard when a septic system was being installed. I use a viewfinder a lot, to try to find interesting angles and unusual compostions. Usually I take a fair amount of time making an accurate drawing.
Although I don’t paint purely abstractly, I am very conscious of the abstract shapes and colors and the relationship to the rectangle.
WHY DO YOU PAINT?
I think the urge to make a mark is innate in humans, we’ve been doing it since cave-people times. For me the visual arts are a process of exploration, but also, I confess to wanting to make something worth looking at. If I’m lucky I come up with something that might have a bit of unexpected beauty, or a different way of seeing the commonplace.
I don’t consciously try to express particular feelings, or any special message, it seems that the feeling emerges during the process of painting. Maybe the message is just how amazing it is to be able to see!
Andrea Rex Website
The WSA is happy to welcome Carol Bershad as an exhibiting member of the WSA. Sometimes a painter’s profession informs their art and that certainly is the case for Carol. As a biologist, she is an astute observer of nature and brings that skill to her beautifully rendered watercolors. To see more of her paintings visit her WSA artist page.
Carol, we look forward to seeing more of your artwork in our upcoming shows!
The WSA is happy to welcome new exhibiting member Laurie Hammer. She is a watercolorist, whose carefully observed subjects are rendered with sensitivity, skill and sometimes a bit of whimsey. Be sure to visit her artist page.
Welcome to the WSA Laurie!!
We are sad to share the news that long time WSA member Nancy Payne passed away on October 21st. She had been a member of the WSA for 24 years and was a regular participant in our shows. Primarily a watercolorist, Nancy’s paintings were especially expressive in their simplicity. She was an enthusiastic participant, having signed up for our plein air event at Elm Bank this past summer, the day before her 90th birthday. She will be missed.
More about Nancy Payne…
Nancy worked with watercolors since 1997 and added acrylics in 2007. She most often worked from life, either en plein air or from still life. She exhibited in the student gallery at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln. In the spring of 2002 she was awarded the prestigious Harold Kolb Watercolor Award by the Wellesley Society of Artists. In 2007 she received an honorable mention for one of her watercolor portraits, from the Lexington Arts and Crafts Society. Nancy enjoyed the “surprises and unpredictability of watercolors.” Acrylics provided a brightness and malleability that she also enjoyed.
December Artist Spotlight
Meet Rowan O’Riley
Rowan O’Riley is a painter of contemporary impressionist portraits living in Wellesley. She paints primarily in acrylics, but occasionally in oil. Her characteristic style employs bold, bright colors to create likenesses with warmth and energy.
Ms. O’Riley is the mother of 3 amazing women and was a competitive horseback rider until recently. She owns 2 equestrian training facilities in Wellington, FL and also sponsors a Paralympic athlete who brought home 3 gold medals from the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games.
Background
Ms. O’Riley began painting in 2012 by taking a Newton Adult Education course recommended by a painter she admired. (Ann Marie O’Dowd, whose brightly colored and patterned paintings of animals were displayed for years at the Wellesley Quebrada store.) With no prior experience, the process of learning to paint was challenging, but the fellow students who routinely signed up for the same course session after session, year after year, were a talented and friendly group, willing to share their knowledge. The instructor Zhanna Cantor was skillful at assisting each student to work on his/her own project. Ms. O’Riley’s results were colorful, but uneven—especially her early attempts at portraits, which often looked grotesque 😆 (if you know, you know).
In 2020, Ms. O’Riley began painting with a skilled artist friend, who shared his techniques with her, and in one brave experiment, worked from the same portrait reference photo while the Mentor artist was in Florida and Ms. O’Riley was in MA. They worked together over FaceTime for weeks, eventually producing two very similar oil paintings of the same subject.
That experience was the key to developing a method that worked for Ms. O’Riley to begin painting portraits on her own.
Artistic Development
After taking an 8-week online course called “Bold Color Bootcamp” offered by the Canadian artist Charla Maarschalk, Ms. O’Riley began to experiment with value, using bright colors according to their lightness or darkness to create portrait images. This was during the Covid lockdown period, when many people were cut off from socializing or working with others. It was a great time to learn new things, but also a very isolated and lonely time. Weekly Zoom calls with family and friends provided connection, and Ms. O’Riley missed the faces of those she loved. So, she began to paint portraits using the newly acquired technique of using colors for their values.
Subjects
During this time, Ms. O’Riley created a series called “My Covid 19”, featuring the 19 faces that she saw regularly when she saw almost no one else. These included her family, her house cleaner, her postman, her contractor and other familiar faces in her everyday life. The process of creating these portraits proved to be a joyful appreciation of each person’s presence.
Process
Ms. O’Riley works from photographs of her subjects, choosing full-front-facing photos that are a frank and candid representation of the individual. She converts the photos to black and white and then creates a sketch to map the features of the subject, relying on the use of a projector to make sure the features are accurate. (Thus avoiding the grotesque effect of features that are a little bit “off”).
Always mixing her colors ahead of time, Ms. O’Riley uses a Sta-Wet palette to keep the acrylics fresh for up to several weeks. She creates an underpainting using watered-down acrylic paint, and then gradually builds
layers of bright colors, following their values on a grey scale for value. Each portrait goes through an ugly stage, but this is often resolved during the following session.
Ms. O’Riley usually takes 10-12 hours to finish a portrait, using the time between painting sessions to look from a distance or take photos with her phone to gauge the accuracy of the likeness. One of her frequent techniques is to take a photo of the painting, convert the photo to black and white, and compare the new black and white image to her reference image.
Why do you paint?
I paint faces because I love people. I find faces more fascinating than landscapes and equally complex. The process of painting a portrait gives me the opportunity to look very closely at the face of my subjects and notice the nuances of their facial expression. I think people wear the face they create as they live their lives.
What next?
I am almost finished with a large series of portraits of my extended family, all painted on a yellow ochre background in bright colors and using full front-facing views of my subjects. Next I would like to explore how little information I can use to create a likeness, and how to create likenesses with only one or two colors. I am also eager to paint faces of people I do not know well, and to incorporate poses that are partial, such as looking up or down or to the side. And to broaden what I can convey in a portrait, I might want to incorporate objects or symbols relevant to the life of the subject.
The WSA is happy to welcome new exhibiting member Darryl Abbey who is self taught watercolorist. He is an enthusiastic creative whose skills extend to woodworking as well. To see more of his work, visit his WSA artist page.
Welcome to the WSA Darryl!
Many thanks to the welcoming and supportive WSA community for this opportunity to share my story. I began dabbling in watercolor after retiring from a long (some would say eclectic) corporate career of forty-five years.
I fell in love with the vivid colors, translucence, and play of light possible using the medium. My paintings are realistic (well, recognizable). Subjects are often pets, people, situations that tell a story or evoke emotion, or treasures from the past that make me smile.
Throughout the last fourteen years I’ve taken lessons from some of the best and most patient instructors through Weston Council on Aging programs and other outside workshops: Paul Alie, Paul George, Marla Greenfield, Andrew Kusmin, Sally Meding, Mary Jo Rines, Dawn Scaltreto, Tony Visco and Nancy Walton. In addition to WSA, I’ve been honored to show with the Needham Arts Association, New England Watercolor Society, the Scituate Art Association and the Rhode Island Watercolor Society.
There is no discernable pattern in my story. With a BA in history from Oberlin and a year as an admissions counselor under my belt, I ventured from Ohio to Boston where there was absolutely no need for history majors.
Through a typing gig, I wangled a job managing Ford and Carnegie Foundation grants at the Sloan School of Management and then joined several MIT faculty member’s spin off consulting companies, first in management information systems and then in quantitative market research, evaluating consumer products prior to market launch— stuff like shampoos, crackers, nicotine gum, frozen tacos, dried baby food, ant and roach killers—challenging work and a great source of frequent flyer miles.
I had no business working alongside quantitative genii except that I could translate technical terms into plain English for brand managers…calling a centroid a dot, a vector a line, not to mention the contortions of explaining multinomial logit models. While cavorting in the land of regressions, I also played violin with the MIT symphony for nine years and studied graphology, handwriting analysis.
My next adventure involved using handwriting analysis for hiring decisions, counseling, jury selection, threat letters and forgeries. Finally, as a head hunter I recommended myself for my last honest job, teaching seminars to large corporations and government agencies here and abroad on how to organize and present complex business documents.
Free at last, I began scribbling and dabbling. After publishing a few short stories. I joined three other writers and became a contributing editor and compositor of six anthologies: Best New England Crime Stories. I parlayed one short story into a mystery, and just sent my third novel off to the publisher. (Check ‘em out: Katfast.com)
Somewhere along the line I settled in Weston and married my college sweetheart twenty years after graduation. He retired last year after fifty-one years of teaching English, the last thirty-five at the Belmont Hill School. It’s been a fun and rewarding ride. Now I can cherish free time to paint and play with words, and relax with my husband, mouthy German Shepherd and three tuxedo cats.
The WSA welcomes another new exhibiting member, Adriana Aviles. A self taught oil and acrylic painter, Adriana works in a larger format to express her exuberance for life and art. To see more of her artwork, visit her WSA artist page.
Welcome to the WSA Adriana!
The WSA is happy to welcome new exhibiting member Sophie Lucas. She has a talent for creating convincingly surreal worlds through her technical skills and use of color. Sophie works in both oils and watercolors. To see more of her paintings visit her WSA artist page . We look forward to seeing more of Sophie’s work in our upcoming shows.
Welcome to the WSA Sophie!
