The WSA is happy to welcome Mena Levit as a new exhibiting member. Mena discovered her voice as a pastel painter a few years ago and paints portraits, still lifes, and the world around her. During that time she has learned how to convey a sense of place and emotion through her paintings. To see more of Mena’s work, visit her WSA artist page. Welcome to the WSA Mena!
January Artist of the Month
Meet Dottie Laughlin
WSA artist member Dottie Laughlin, views her art as part of a never-ending adventure over the last twenty-one years. From learning how to frame a canvas to selling her first painting, there was always a new experience to learn and appreciate.
Born and raised outside Chicago, Laughlin enjoyed taking art classes in college, however her career in business operations took precedence at the time. She met her husband while working at Baxter Laboratories and they proceeded to live in both the Netherlands and Australia for over eight years before returning to the U.S. Laughlin ponders, “It wasn’t until I was struggling with three young sons and a Minnesota winter that I found my way back to oil painting.” She credits much of her appreciation of art to her training as a children’s docent at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
After moving to Boston in 2000, she continued her studies at the Danforth Museum and took classes with various Boston artists, including several years with William Bartlett an artist member of the Guild of Boston Artists. New England’s natural beauty and inspiring artists have encouraged her to paint both plein air and in the studio. Her first plein air adventure found her ten miles out to sea on Monhegan Island, and later the Hudson River Valley, New Hampshire and the warmth of the Caribbean. At home she is inspired by the flowers in her garden (her other passion), the fruit of the season and the simple items of everyday life.
The highlights of her artistic adventures are artist’s workshops, open studios and membership in the WSA. Her teaching job in the Needham Public Schools gave her the summers free to totally immerse herself in the painting process for several days at a time, including attending artist workshops. “To learn and paint with professional artists, the likes of Peter Fiori, John MacDonald, Kathy Anderson, Joe McGurl and Mark Boedges, all had an immense impact” on her artistic ability. Participating in open studios in the area suburbs gave her the experience and opportunity to show her work. As a longtime member of the WSA, she has served as a board member, treasurer and president. Her contributions to this group are immeasurable and she values “being part of an organization that supports artists and the community” as well as the lasting friendships she has made.
Laughlin has found the emergence of online painting classes during the pandemic to be incredibly helpful. She is impressed with the technical level of classes and has participated in classes by Debra Paris and Adriano Farinella. She is eager to get back to painting with others in person. “It is the experience of watching a painting unfold that is so amazing and interesting” to this artist who is very grateful for this part of her life.
Over 50 exhibiting members are participating in the Annual Library Show (December 1-30), which showcases the diverse talent of the WSA membership. The award winners were announced on December 5 at the WSA annual members meeting. Nationally recognized artist and teacher, Jeanne Rosier Smith judged the show. To see the awards winners artwork and read the judge’s comments, visit the WSA Award Winning Art page. Congratulations to all the award winners!
Maria Babb is the winner of the People’s Choice award for the WSA 2021 Fall Hybrid Show. Maria’s painting entitled, “Just for Kicks” also won first place in the judge’s awards. The show is on display at the Webster Bank in Needham and online until January 3,2022. Maria Babb’s painting can be seen at the Webster Bank. Congratulations Maria!
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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!
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.
