Paintings by Kellene Champlin | | My education & career are thoroughly entwined. With a BS in Art Education from Buffalo State College in NY I taught elementary art for ten years, then twenty years as an art education administrator. In the 1970s throughout a Master of Visual Arts degree at Georgia State University I was creating two- and three-dimensionally with fabrics and fibers. Over 20 fabric constructions, soft sculptures and wall hangings reside in collections in eight states. During the 1980s I completed a PhD in curriculum & instruction which found me writing, publishing, and creating with ideas, but not with art materials. With the turn of the millennium, I brought to a close a wonderful career. So, after 30 years in Atlanta GA, my husband and I moved back to the Rochester NY area; certainly not for snow, rather, for a large family.
My major goal in retirement was to regain and nurture the art-making part of me. For some years I have worked in watercolor with regionally known painter, Dick Kane, in a studio setting at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery where I experience demos, individual instruction, and most importantly, critiques. I value my occasional studio workshops with Frank Webb and other painters as I continue to cultivate my own personal style.
The diversity of Impressionist style and technique has always influenced my art making regardless of medium. The luminosity of John Constable’s landscapes moves me, but it is Impressionist painting that truly inspires me – shape and form as reflection of color and light, structural suggestion, and atmospheric qualities of elusive depth – especially in the landscapes of Cezanne, Pissarro, and Sisley. In contemporary watercolor I study Winslow Homer, Jeanne Dobie, Edgar Whitney and some of his “disciples” – Frank Webb, Tony Couch, and Betty Lou Schlemm.
The content of my paintings is rooted in a very personal response to what and how I choose to see. I try to interpret glimpses of light and beauty; I seek to capture slices of life. I continually challenge myself to translate my impressions into a personally satisfying representation that utilizes the qualities of watercolor that I find so enticing: reflection, sparkle, clarity, light, and (of course) transparency. It is the optical reality of Impressionism to which I aspire in my watercolors.
-the artist- |
