Cheryl Pass - Life, be still
I count it as a great privilege to be in contact with so many very talented artists every day here on Artist Hideout. So first of all, thanks for helping build this great community.
Cheryl Pass submitted two of her pieces yesterday for inclusion in Artist Hideout. After reading some of her blog I wrote her and asked her to share some tips as well as some experiences with you here.
So I asked about the first experiences of her childhood she remembered of creating art.
…my mother was extremely strict and her favorite thing to do was tell me to go to my room. O.K., nothing but pencils and notebook paper and a radio to occupy my mind and time, so drawing became the thing to do while waiting to be uncaged. I’m sure my drawings were awful at that time in my life. Lessons came much later, the first one from an adult education class at an extension of Muskingum College when I was about 19 and in between other college experiences. The class for an entire semester was based on painting a pear, but I loved every minute of it. I married and raised my children and studied various avenues of art in between moving to Colorado, California, back to Ohio, and then to North Carolina. I studied with local art instructors for several years after moving here, became active in our local art guild serving as President for a time, began doing commissions and then…..
In the 1980’s I took a part-time job designing Christmas ornaments for a local manufacturer. In 1991 I started up a stationery company named
Wild Hare based on my watercolors. The stationery line was successful and marketed nationally. Owning the company meant wearing a lot of hats besides doing the designs, so after ten years I decided it was time to get back to my real love of painting. I now work from my beautiful backyard studio at my home.
Where she met this little guy…
Cheryl has a lot of experience with still life painting as well and shares with us some tips and tricks on how to set up a great still life:
The idea here is to capture some objects in an environment that you want to look at over and over again. Sometimes you come across a still
life that just happens in front of you. Lucky for you when that happens. Grab it and paint it (or take a picture) as fast as you can! Subject matter can be infinite, but I think you want to pick something with which you personally have an emotional connection. If you do this, you will see the nuances, the way it catches the light and occupies the space. If you are setting up your own still life, you find yourself in charge of creating the lighting and the arrangement, so this method isn’t as spontaneous as some other categories of art. This arrangement can be formal where everything is placed as if on a stage, or you can strive to make it look more spontaneous, i.e. dropping a napkin down as if someone just casually placed it there while leaving the table. I think you treat a still life like a landscape, in that the basics of composition, color, light, and shapes all are the same. The trick, (also like landscape) if there is one, is to draw the viewer into a moment in time and the lighting is the critical factor for this.
Thank you Cheryl for submitting this piece and sharing with us your experiences and some useful tips.
If you would like to be featured on Artist Hideout please see how you can submit your work here.
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