March 2016 35OVER 60 ART COMPETITION
Suzanne Vigil
Age 68 • Alexandria, Virginia • suzannevigil.com
I received my master
of i ne arts degree
from the University
of Kentucky and also
attended the Corcoran
School of Art and
Design. I worked for the Drug Enforcement
Administration and rose to the position of
director of graphics, retiring after 35 years.
I began incorporating warm and cold gray
into my palette—warm for i gures and cold for
objects. h e stark drawings that came from this
practice lent themselves to an intense contrast,
making the i gures or objects pop. For Pensive
I accomplished this with woodless colored pen-
cils and acrylic paint. I added more contrast by
working broad strokes of black acrylic on the
backside to of set the realistic i gure. I wanted
to see if I could maintain the interest of the
i gure with few facial features. I tend to bring
out the gritty side of i gures, no doubt as a result
from my many years in law enforcement.
Art of ers a lifetime of constant explora-
tionandsurprise.Whatbetterwaytokeepyou
young?M.W.
Marc Chatov
Age 62 • Rutledge, Georgia • chatovstudio.com
I grew up in a home of artists, musi-
cians and stage professionals and began
my career in i ne art painting when
I was 18. My father was a Russian-
born-and-trained muralist, i gurative
painter and portrait artist. In 1958 my
family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where my father and uncle
(also a portrait painter and trained concert pianist), founded the
Chatov Studio. I attended Georgia State University as a i ne arts
major where I studied drawing under the late James Sitton. I
also studied at the Art Students League of New York under
Michael Burban and Nelson Shanks.
I begin a painting by massing in the objects with a thin raw
umber wash over a white ground. h en I i nd my background
color and block in the areas surrounding my shapes using an
impressionistic, open stroke. I carefully draw my objects with a
warm, dark mixture of dioxazine purple with transparent oxide
red. Working from darks to lights, I keep my shadows lean
and the lights more impasto. On the water jug, I utilized knife
work along with some glazes and drips to create texture. In
my color selection I constantly played warm against cool tones.
h e background was developed using a mother color—a gray I
achieve by blending all the color mixtures on my palette.
Growing up amid the rich culture of my family’s atelier,
I was exposed to the academic principles of art and to profes-
sionals in the art world—witnessing from an early age how they
translated the world onto canvas. M.W. ■
ABOVE: The Ol’ Coffee Mill (oil on gessoed panel, 21x27)ABOVE: Pensive (colored pencil, woodless colored pen-
cil and acrylic paint on frosted acetate, 36x24)