Artist Statement

As a landscape painter living at the turn of the millennium, I am a preservationist of a threatened world.  I paint in the dawn and through the changing light of the day the endangered natural and agricultural vistas.  As people speed ever faster through their lives, spend their days and nights in human-made environments, I capture in oil paint the bend of prairie grass heavy with seeds, the color of the sumac flaming in an autumn dusk, the light on the snow of a wintry woods.

I have been a landscape painter for almost 30 years. I began my work in the Flint Hills of Kansas, painted coastal New England for many years, and now make my home outside of Lake Mills, Wisconsin, with my husband, Steve Bower.

As a painter of the natural world, old architecture, and gardens, I've found our new home to be perfect. We built it on an old farm site that overlooks an Audubon Sanctuary prairie and the Crawfish River. We moved a nearly century-old town hall to our property in 2003 and turned it into a studio/gallery/woodworking shop. Our house is solar and we are in the process of surrounding it with flower and vegetable gardens. Maybe someday we will have the time to resurrect the old orchard!

Living here I do not have far to look for inspiration. Every morning the sun rises over the prairie with the river beyond reflecting back the color of the sky. Every sunrise is a new painting. The natural world has always been a source of wonder and delight for me. After these many years of painting I still seek to capture the beauty that I see every day. Each painting is a poem of gratitude.

I love old architecture and the sense of history and life stories that it represents. I find more grace in the simple lines of an old barn than I do in most recent structures. I appreciate the jumble of shapes and colors of a flower garden and the orderly rows of a vegetable plot. The light on an old building changing as the day passes, the garden coming to fruition and fading with the season ─- these are the transitory moments that you will find in my work.

I pay attention. I paint the wonder of the world.

Leslie DeMuth

Barbara C Anderson, Elegant Beans , 2006, Watercolor, 30 1/2" x 25"

Artist Statement

The Wisconsin landscape is my inspiration. I grew up across the street from theWisconsin landscape artist, Marshall Glacier. It may be that the time I spent in his studio as a child encouraged me to become an landscape artist. As a life long resident of Wisconsin, I cannot help but feel alarmed at the large numbers of houses and developments that are engulfing the rural landscape. I hope to preserve some of my favorite rural views through my paintings. Sometimes I can see a familiar view in a new way that inspires a painting. A tree may appear orange from the sun as it is setting and since color is one of my strongest interests, this is a time of day I often look for inspiration.

In this show many of my paintings concentrate on life here in the Madison area. This year I have added human figures to some ofmycompositions. ("Morning Farmer's Market" and "No Lifeguard On Duty", the beach at Vilas Park the first day it is officially closed. ) Pheasant Branch Conservancy is now my backyard and naturally the beauty of this wild life area has also attracted me. (" Pheasant Branch Creek" and "Lonesome Trees".)

For over twenty years I have worked at Westwing Studios in Verona, which is located at the Dane County hospital Badger Prairie Health Care Center. At Westwing Studios the artists spend time working with the residents of the hospital in exchange for studio space.

This arrangement between artists and government might be unique in the United States.

Dagny Quisling Myrah