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. Visit Nancy’s WSA artist page.
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!
The WSA is happy to share the news that associate member Megan Stride was recently juried in as an exhibiting member. Megan is a representational painter, with a sensitive eye to subject matter and moments. To see more of Megan’s paintings visit her WSA artist page. We look forward to seeing more of Megan’s paintings in our upcoming shows! Welcome Megan!
October Artist Spotlight
Meet Hannah Nersasian
Hannah Nersasian creates playful acrylic paintings of animals, birds and bugs, using vintage papers or reclaimed boards as her canvases. Originally from Somerset, England, Hannah moved to the USA in 2010. She now lives in Framingham MA with her husband, 9yo son and 5yo daughter.
Tell us a little about your background as an artist…
Art and painting have been a refuge for me since childhood. In highschool I’d camp out in the art room as a survival tactic. I studied Art up until A-level but decided English Literature was a safer degree choice – a decision I now seriously question!
I ended up working in the non profit sector but would always find a way to steer my work back towards creating – be it decorating a dolls’ house for a family shelter playroom or organizing mural painting for corporate volunteers. When my son Wylder was born I stopped work and threw myself head first into motherhood. I found it all consuming and overwhelming and soon started painting regularly during his nap time as a way to reclaim my sense of self.
What do you paint?
I almost always paint animals, birds or bugs – they just spark my interest more – and I use fun backgrounds as a way to say something about the subject. When I first started selling my work I tried to paint what I thought would sell rather than what I found most appealing. Unsurprisingly, I’m not the biggest fan of this earlier work! It wasn’t until I started painting things that delighted and amused me that I really found a style that felt true to me. I often paint pieces designed to interact with each other – a fox staring at a squirrel, an owl hovering above a tiny mouse.
What is your process?
I love to find interesting backgrounds and reclaimed things (record sleeves, chopping boards, sheet music or maps) and to use that as a jumping off point for the subject. A map of North America sparks the migration of Monarch Butterflies or the musical direction “Lento” might inspire a snail painting.
Once I have the background and an idea for a subject, I’ll search for a reference photo. Where possible I take my own photographs, but often use Pixabay, Unsplash or buy stock photos. Then I decide on the placement of the image and when it’s sketched out I’ll start laying down paint. A painting will take many different layers of color and texture before it has the depth I’m happy with. And for a bird or animal with feathers / fur, it can take ages to build up those layers. I tend to paint as much detail as a can and I use tiny brushes.
Why do you paint?
I’m an introvert living in a house of noisy extroverts and I have a very busy mind that can teeter into anxiety at times. Painting is the closest I get to meditation. When I’m immersed in painting, I concentrate fully and time zooms past at an unbelievable rate (not that that’s necessarily a good thing!). I also see it as a way of putting my whole quirky self out there for the world to know – and I like to highlight nature and all the tiny incredible things around us that are so often overlooked.
What are your painting goals for the next year?
My daughter started Kindergarten this September and I’ve found myself with more time and quiet than I’ve ever had. I’m hoping that this year I’ll form relationships with more shops and galleries, join additional local Artist groups, answer Calls for Art and really try to sell my work consistently. First up is the fall show “FRESH” at Gallery Twist in Lexington, where I have a number of pieces. I’m also trying to grow my instagram account in a meaningful way – forming connections with other artists and nature/art lovers rather than just follower numbers. My Instagram handle is @wyld_woodland
