ArtistsNetwork.com 63“Caran d’Ache watercolor sticks are
great, too, especially in the beginning
when I’m making a foundation of
color and marks,” Wright says.
“Toward the end, I may pull in some
oil pastels, too.”
Emotion Over
Sentiment
Some artists include items with spe-
cial meaning in their still life setups,
but Wright stays away from the senti-
mental. “I don’t tend to use objects
that have an emotional weight for
me,” she says. “I feel as though that Turnthepagefora demo.
“Walking around Capitol Hill last
summer, I noticed small city gardens
in front of rowhouses, planted with
magnifi cent, towering sunfl owers,”
says the artist, who lives in McLean, Va.,
about 20 minutes away. Inspired, she
bought some fresh sunfl owers to work
from in the studio for Girasoles 2
(acrylic, graphite and oil pastel on paper,
40x26). “The dancing brushwork brings
in the feel of the urban chaos, and the oil
pastel marks capture the ubiquitous
wrought iron fencing in front of those
houses,” Wright says. “I love the Spanish
word for sunfl owers, girasoles, which
essentially means ‘turn to the sun.’”I want to respond not necessarily by
copying it precisely, but by creating
more beauty that will in turn evoke
an emotional response.”From Still Life
to Something More
Wright considers still life setups more
closely when painting flowers so that
she can best capture their essence.
“I want to know the curve of the stem,
how the flower attaches to it, where
on the petals the light falls, what
shape the flowers take as a group
and individually,” she says. “I may
make just a few brushstrokes and
then go back to look again. I’m not
painting everything I see, but it’s
being distilled down so that, hope-
fully, the personality of the flowers
is manifesting itself.”
It’s the appeal of the more ambigu-
ous areas in her paintings that keeps
Wright intrigued and her viewers
involved. “I’ve always loved a good
mystery, and painting this way is, in
a sense, like being inside the mystery,”
she says. “Which way will it go? Will it
be completely abstract? Will there be
some elements of representation? Or
will it be highly representational?”
Wright hopes her efforts to reach
beyond the conventions of tradi-
tional still life stir curiosity and
emotion in her viewers and that
they’re drawn in as their eyes travel
through her work to make new dis-
coveries. “It’s kind of like standing
on the edge of something,” she says,
“and jumping in.”Stefanie Laufersweiler is a freelance
writer and editor living in Cincinnati.would get in the way of how I work.
I might get too involved in ‘Oh, this
was my sweet daughter’s shoe when
she was just learning to walk’ and get
anxious about getting it ‘right.’ That
would doom me from the start.”
Emotion, however, factors heavily
into Wright’s artwork. “Artist George
De Groat [American, 1917–95] once
said, ‘Paint from the inside out,’ and
that’s what I’m trying to do. My paint-
ing is an emotional response to the
world around me, not just to the still
life in front of me,” Wright says.
“When I’m astonished by beauty,