By Cheryl Bowsher | Member
I loved the desert the first time I saw it. I was inspired by the mountains, the mesas, and the desert floor—they have the courage to show themselves in all their stony strength. And the sky in the desert is so big and so deeply blue that it takes my breath away.
I also love color. I need color. If I didn’t have color in my life, I would soon become deeply depressed. Green is like breathing. Purple is pure energy. Blue is cold and honest. Gold is love and safety.
When I discovered watercolor, I combined my loves for the desert and for color while exercising my creativity. Exercising? Yes, painting is exercising in the best sense, because it lets my creative spirit out to frolic in the light of day. When I haven’t painted in a while, I hear my brushes calling: “Let me out. I want to play.” Then, when I’m actually painting, I have puddles of wet color in my palette, my favorite angled shader brush in my hand, and a thrill in my heart. Sometimes other implements, like my pastels or drawing pencils, call to me and I work in other media for a while, but I always return to watercolor. It will always be my favorite medium because of the way the light shines through brilliant colors.
I like exploring new ways of applying color to paper. In one painting, I applied wet threads to the paper, dropped paint on it, and let the color travel along the fibers. Other times, I applied plastic food wrap to wet paint to get a crinkly texture, or represented sandstone by liberally sprinkling kosher salt on wet paint. I have also painted shapes, let them dry, cut them out, and applied them to another painting as collage. You can see many of my paintings at www.cherab.net.
I have noticed that, when people find out that I am a painter, often the first question they ask is whether I ever sell my paintings. I think it is sad that folks tend to ask about money instead of about my work itself. It is a heartbreaking fact that most people simply can’t relate to a creative process and so they have to try to think of this in terms of something they do understand—money.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about art and artists. Hollywood likes to show artists who create Art with a capital “A” for the sake of art itself and who have little in common with regular people. So, what is an artist? I think it is someone who sees or hears or feels something that other people cannot, and who uses his or her talents to help others learn to see or hear or feel. An artist can work in a creative form like watercolor, photography, sculpture, fiction, music, or any other medium.
Most of my paintings are abstract or semi-abstract. As writers, most of us probably know that the word abstract means “to take away.” Therefore, an abstract painting is one in which details have been removed, to focus attention on the important parts. In my paintings, I am inspired by colors, shapes, and textures, and I try to leave out the parts that might obscure those features. I want to help people see with an artist’s eye.
Dream Mesa by Cheryl Bowsher
My favorite artist, Georgia O’Keefe, saw the beauty in very small, ordinary objects, like a trumpet flower. She often took one or two of these objects and painted them in extreme close up, on canvases covering several square feet.
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
—Georgia O’Keefe
I hope that my own humble paintings help someone learn to see a blue sky, or a lavender mountain, or a glowing red mesa.
