About Beth’s Art

Giving and Receiving Note Cards

I love finding a note card with a personal message in my mailbox. Each time I reread the card, I hold the sender in my heart. Creating note cards allows me to share my art at an affordable price while offering you and yours the pleasure of holding each other in your hearts.

Flower Cards - Flowers are my year round muse, delighting and befuddling me in their complexity, and beauty. Woodland Spring ephemerals arrive in early April. I hunt for dutch man britches, blood root, trout lilies, Jack in the pulpit and more, taking aim with my camera, returning to my studio to paint. From May through October my summer studio moves to the screen porch where endless cut flowers fill vases, watercolor journals and oil canvases. I paint zinnias, day lilies, iris and bleeding hearts year after year, pulling other flowers into the rotation as I please. In the depth of winter I paint cyclamen, amaryllis and orchids glowing in window light, waiting for Spring to return.

Landscape cards - Raised in rural Nebraska, my eye is drawn to wide open spaces. I favor long shadows, and changes in light, broad vistas and back-lit trees. It is a rare treat to paint “en plein air,” outdoors, in real time. It is common for me to begin painting on site, capturing the vista with my camera and completing the process in my studio.

Holiday Cards - Outside the trees drift in dusky light. Winter solstice nights echo with owls courting in the moonlight. Christmas trees and glittery ornaments twinkle and swirl in a warm cozy house. The motifs in these small paintings, drawn from my imagination, are designed to be reproduced as holiday cards, but the originals hang in my home as the focal point of my holiday decorating.

Beth’s Painting Process

Most of my paintings begin with a general idea and a limited palette. While I paint with exacting attention to what I am seeing, I tend to paint in an improvisational manner, often in short bursts. Some paintings are completed in one sitting, while others are revisited or become a series over the course of months. I favor line and movement over depth in composition. Perhaps this reflects my early interest in Scandinavian textiles, flavoring my work with a somewhat decorative quality.

Being in the Flow

Painting is the most direct route to flow, a state when I am completely focused on seeing, perceiving and painting. In the flow, time falls away as one brush stroke leads to the next.

Add water and pigment to paper, and watch what happens. That’s flow.

Try to control what happens. That’s practice and mastery.

Try letting go of what happens. That’s being in the flow.