Wellesley Society of Artists

June Artist Spotlight 

Meet Sheila Davis 

WSA Member Since 2024

As a representational painter working primarily in oil, watercolor, and pastel, my work is rooted in observation and a lifelong study of light, color, atmosphere, and composition. Although my earliest professional work began in commercial art, painting eventually became my primary focus. Understanding color, light, space, and quiet movement have become my objective. Over time, my subject matter has evolved to landscapes, seascapes, and marsh studies inspired by the coastlines of Maine and Massachusetts, particularly the Kennebunks and the northern New England shore. For me, painting is an ongoing process of discovery. With every painting, I learn more about light, time, nature, and myself.

My education began at the Art Institute of Boston and Massachusetts College of Art. It continued through years of independent study and mentorship with painters including Lois Tarlow, Michael Dowling, and Robert Douglas Hunter. I have been a member of the Copley Society of Art and the Pastel Society of America, through which my work was exhibited in New York City. I also have a piece in the permanent collection of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. I am currently a member of the Guild of the Kennebunks, Dedham Art Association, Marblehead Arts Association, and the Wellesley Society of Artists.

When my daughters reached high school, teaching art became a meaningful extension of my studio practice. I developed an elementary school art program that integrated art history, aesthetics, and visual principles into the curriculum, and later expanded it to middle school visual arts education. I taught for nearly thirty years and found the educational community, which I am still a part of, both rewarding and deeply inspiring. 

Throughout my career, I have remained committed to the idea that artistic growth never ends, and that the creative community is an enduring source of encouragement and connection. I have a great appreciation for the art community and my fellow creatives. After all, I am and always have been a creative. That identity defines me. 

May Artist Spotlight 

Nancy Boyle’s  Art Journey

My creative journey began by watching my mother, aunt, and uncle—all artists whose work first sparked my interest in art. After studying at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, I spent years working in graphic design for small local publishers and companies. A transformative trip to Alaska eventually became a four-year residency in Homer, where I helped establish a community arts center with local artists. My friends often urge me to write a book about those adventures; perhaps I finally will once I truly ‘retire from my retirement.’

Throughout my career, I remained a student, taking workshops and primarily working in watercolor. However, everything changed during a plein air workshop in Boston with artist Vincent Crotty. I clearly remember the first time I squeezed oil colors onto a palette. I was set up in a shady spot in Fort Point, watching the sun gradually illuminate my workspace while I struggled with the ‘sticky, hot’ paint, having no idea what to do. Vincent’s perceptive and kind teaching was the only thing that kept me from abandoning the project on the spot. Though I initially found oil paints impossible—messy, sticky, and seemingly never-drying compared to watercolors—they are now my favorite medium. To keep my indoor studio safer, I’ve switched to Cobra Water Mixable Oils rather than thinning with Gamsol mineral spirits. Recently I have found inspiration from artist Charlie Hunter, specifically his use of a monochromatic palette and unconventional tools like squeegees, shapers, and Q-tips. This spring, I plan to use these techniques in plein air at local farms including Codman Community Farms in Lincoln to capture its interesting outbuildings, barns, and livestock.

Two years ago, I decided to tackle the challenge of portraiture. While I had been drawing the figure for years, I didn’t yet feel I had the technical foundation to paint portraits in oils. To bridge that gap, I completed two intensive online courses with Marvin Mattelson, studying directly from his New York studio via Zoom. He taught me a highly specific methodology for color mixing and the precision required for accurate drawing—a disciplined practice I look forward to refining in the years ahead.

After several studio moves, I recently returned to a home-based practice. The transition was challenging, and for a while, I struggled to find my creative rhythm. To spark a ‘reset,’ I began experimenting with mixed media in my basement studio while keeping my upstairs space dedicated to oils. This shift toward mixed media reintroduced a sense of playfulness that reignited my passion for making art. It led me to explore new techniques via YouTube and inspired recent portraits of my grandchildren, Adrian and Ana. Now, with spring approaching, I am ready to head outdoors with my plein air supplies. I look forward to painting alongside the local community. I am always open to sharing feedback and advice with fellow artists—feel free to get in touch!

April Artist Spotlight

Photo Credit John Harcharek

Meet Darryl Abbey

Darryl Abbey is a watercolorist who resides in Holliston, MA and has been painting since 2000. With landscapes and waterscapes as a primary focus, Darryl has recently moved into creating portraits.

MY BACKGROUND

My life was filled with the arts from an early age. My sister is a pianist who went to music school and had a long career as a music teacher and as a church organist. My father painted with oils as a hobby for several decades so there was art in my family throughout my youth.

I started my own involvement in the arts as a musician. Trained as a classical vocalist, I studied at Boston Conservatory and Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ.  While attending Westminster, I had the privilege of performing with some of the greatest conductors in the world (Bernstein, Boulez, Mehta, Ozawa and many more). I also composed and arranged music, and, in my spare time, I played drums in a jazz band. After graduation, my wife (whom I met at Westminster) and I moved to Boston and started our careers as professional musicians. When we chose to expand our family, I decided it was time to move into the stability of the business world and began a career related to the aviation industry.

As respects my involvement in visual arts, I am mostly self-taught. I started drawing small sketches in my early thirties as a pastime while I commuted on the train to and from my job in Boston. It wasn’t until 2000 when, after creating some landscape sketches on a family vacation, I decided that adding color would enhance the overall impact of my art. I have spent the past 25 years, on and off, painting landscapes, sea and waterscapes and still life images from around New England and Italy. The freedom to choose my subjects and paint what I want to paint is a luxury I treasure.

 WHAT IS MY PROCESS?

I am fortunate to have a large, comfortable studio in my home and I enjoy retreating to my private space, putting some music on the sound system and losing myself in art. I paint from reference photos and my own imagination. I draw inspiration from the artists of the Hudson River School and their detailed and color driven landscape paintings. I enjoy the process of painting and creating a tight, realistic representation of my chosen view. My work is not generally an exact copy of a reference photo, and I take artistic license as much as I feel works well, provided that the painting is visually appealing.

I have tried loosening my painting style and dabbling in impressionist and abstract pieces but then I revert to tight realism because, to me, creating a realistic painting which is pleasing to the viewer is what I do best.

It pleases me when I get to the point in a painting when I know that it will come together. For me, painting is like putting a puzzle together: There is a lot of thought given to layout (composition), searching for the right puzzle pieces (the right colors) and putting the puzzle together (assembling my creation). When I feel that a painting is complete, I tend to leave it out on display for a period of time because, as many of us feel, a painting is never really finished.

WHAT DO I PAINT?

I really enjoy painting broad expanses of countryside (valleys, fields, lakes and harbors). Many years ago in a museum, I came across a number of works by Thomas Cole, FE Church, Jasper Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt and other artists whom I learned were part of a collective known as “The Hudson River School”. I found their large landscapes featuring the Adirondack mountains, the Hudson Valley, and their use of color and attention to detail inspiring. Their work has had a profound influence on my style of landscape art. I also enjoy painting small scale architecture (i.e. house portraits). I paint still life subjects, but I find them most challenging because of the exactitude required to capture the subject realistically. You can see a broader scope of my work on my website, www.dabbeyart.com . 

Last year, I decided that I wanted to try portraiture. I was fortunate to find a fantastic teacher/mentor, Livia Monseau who teaches at the MFA School and the Museum of Fine Arts in NY. Livia has been a great resource, and I learned a lot about perspective, use of positive and negative space and tones.

                                    WHAT AM I WORKING ON NOW?

I recently participated in a workshop (sponsored by WSA) with Irena Roman, a phenomenally talented portrait artist. She was an excellent instructor and opened my eyes to techniques which I would never have imagined were possible. I am currently working on a complex portrait using those newly learned techniques. Now that I have added portrait work to my focus, I have a whole new set of skills to work on and challenges to face. We’ll see how it turns out. In addition, I imagine that I will find a nice Spring themed landscape idea which I can work on to balance out the portrait.

Like many artists, painting started as a hobby to provide balance to the mental rigors of my job helping large aerospace corporations manage risk. When I retired last year, I found myself finally free to devote myself to art on a deeper level and now I revel in the freedom which that affords me.

Darryl is a member of the Wellesley Society of Arts and the Hopkinton Center for the Arts. He is represented by the Premier Image Gallery in Ashland, MA. See more of Darryl’s work on his website

March Artist Spotlight

Meet Johan Ellefsen

Johan S. Ellefsen is a landscape artist and works in an impressionist style, capturing fleeting moments and atmospheric light with loose brushstrokes. He also illustrates children’s books; and, as a writer, he delves into topics such as the meaning of Prehistoric art. He is originally from Bolivia and now lives in Wellesley.

Tell us a little about how you started painting

Painting came to me by chance. I began painting in my early 20s at a time I started law school and writing my first essays about Ancient Greece. You could say that it was a desire to fill a blank canvas. My first painting came as an afterthought. The idea first arose following a conversation with my father – one of those fine days we embarked in meandering discussions about art, history, ancient civilizations, oriental rugs or whatever topic our curiosity fancied about that day. I remember saying that it was unlikely for me to have the ability to make a rug or have the means to discover an ancient ruin, but I could certainly do a painting. My father took my word for it and challenged me to make a painting after a photograph he had. The photo of a large Cumulonimbus cloud looming over a sailboat – the calm before the storm – was definitely a challenge.

The process of making that first painting thought me a lot about how to tackle a project I have never done before. It took patience and a lot of observation. At first, I was unable to capture the atmosphere of the picture, putting a lot of color and texture into the canvas to the verge of ruining the painting. I had to leave the painting to rest. But then, obsessed with the project, I intensely began observing clouds and other paintings, until I could close my eyes and visualize what I wanted. After adding some layers of paint, the apparent mistakes of prior days became the traces and nuances emerging from beneath the clouds. Oil paint is a forgiving medium. I knew then that I was hooked on art for life. The hallmarks of that first painting are still visible in my current work: the temperamental nature of water and the physical texture of oil paints. After almost thirty years of making art, I still consider my first painting one of my best works.

Tell us a little about your background

Over the years, art has accompanied me around the world. Living in Paris, I spent hours drawing the sculptures at the Louvre. While in Bolivia, I depicted the mountains, and in Western New York and New England the changing seasons. Art has given me a unique perspective of the world, one that otherwise I would have missed altogether.

I am an Exhibiting Member of the Wellesley Society of Artists since 2023 and regularly exhibit my work in the Annual Library Shows. My first exhibition was in 2006 in the library of the Lycée International de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, where I showed a series of drawings from sculptures from the Louvre Museum. In 2021, I exhibited my oil paintings in the Nemacolin Resort in Pennsylvania. In December 2024, I obtained the Yale Nicolls Award for Best Interpretation of the Natural World with the painting “Canadaway Creek.” More recently, in January 2025 my work was exhibited in the Foyer of the Wellesley Free Library.

What motivates you to paint?

For me, art is a unique and powerful medium to express ideas and emotions, many of which cannot be truly expressed in words. The aesthetic appreciation of an image is simply a component of art, not the reason for its existence. I like to reflect on the shared experience of art, both as a painter and as an arts writer. I see my art as a dialogue rather than a representation of reality. My paintings are a conversation with the artists that inspired me as well as a moment in my life. Admittedly, many times my hand proves to have a mind of its own –assertive and opinionated. The resulting painting is the record of that dialogue.

I believe that art doesn’t want to charm you. It wants to possess you. To do this, art needs to access your mind by means of emotions. I am always fascinated with listening to people and finding out how a particular work of art resonates with their individual experiences. If effective, art casts a spell that takes our imagination to an unworldly place. Artists paint the visible to attain the invisible.

February Artist Spotlight

Meet Joan Onofrey

Collage is my favorite art medium.  An artist once described “the essence of collage as an exuberant response to the use of paper.”  In the past, art images of pasted papers were called “papiers colles” eventually evolving into the term collage.  To me, collage is this exciting, spontaneous process where images come to life. There is a freedom and energy involved with the tearing and cutting of paper into shapes. With a whimsical point of view, I imagine and create motifs and themes of landscapes, animals (especially chickens), plants and flowers with bits of paper, and at times, adding fabric, threads, wire or anything that I can glue onto a surface.

December Artist Spotlight

Meet Sophie Lucas

In 2007 I started to develop my abstract art Miracle of Life (french title Articulations Immobiles). This work is marked by the influence of American Abstract Expressionism, French Nouveau Réalisme and Nature-driven Japanese sensibility. The Hubert Duprat’s creations and specifically his architect insects was also a source of inspiration. Just as, The Pink Floyd’s movie, The Wall, played a significant role in this disembodied aesthetic. I tried to develop a view by full color immersive monumetals and meditative paintings.

Passionate by painting I decided to devote my time to painting. I continued developing painting project. Since I have been in the US, I’ve had the opportunity to sharpen my technique on Miracle of Life and also to extend my art to surrealism with the Heart Collection.

Currently I am a member of the Wellesley Society of Artists and the Arlington Center for The Arts.

October Artist Spotlight

Meet Lynn Dennis

Lynn Dennis is a native Chicagoan, but she lived in Los Angeles and St. Louis before arriving in the Boston area twenty – four years ago.  She has an undergraduate degree in Political Science and graduate degrees in Social Work and in Jewish Studies.  Currently, Lynn resides in Wellesley.

Lynn began investing time in art shortly before her retirement seven years ago.  Prior to that, she had approached her careers as a psychotherapist, teacher and administrator with creative intention, developing a reputation for “thinking outside of the box.”   However, she had been well aware of a longing to immerse herself in color and pattern, a desire that remained on her bucket list far too long. 

Lynn tried a variety of local art classes in an effort to find the medium that was most gratifying to her.  And she took several art history classes to not only better understand evolutionary art trends, but to also better appreciate the possibilities that art affords.  Currently, she finds acrylic painting on fairly large canvases most fulfilling.  Ironically, despite her love of large swaths of color, Lynn burns through a lot of small brushes as patterns emerge in her paintings.  She is the sort of artist who sees the trees before the forest. 

Lynn’s artistic theme is “Life in Color.”  Most of her paintings are loose interpretations of her observations of our local area and of her visits elsewhere, particularly to Santa Cruz, CA.  Lynn is drawn to the stories our surroundings tell and she tries to capture these stories on canvas.