Portraits || Portraits of Children || Western Art || Landscape || Still Life
Painting Galleries
Portrait || Portraits of Children || Western Art || Landscape || Still Life
“If it weren’t for Mo Udall, I might not have ended up a painter.
In the spring of 1988 I went to Washington D.C. to work as an intern in the congressional office of then US representative Mo Udall. I hated it. I was not good at it. I seemed to have a gift for fumbling the simplest clerical tasks.
I had gone to the Capitol with the idea that I might like to be a lawyer some day. One day I found myself insanely jealous of the men who were painting the exterior of the building in which I worked and knew something was dreadfully wrong. It was then that I decided to become a painter.
Finding an art school was difficult. I knew I wanted to paint portraits, which is a discipline that requires accurate drawing and solid technique. It seemed to me that most art schools emphasized wild originality and overt social commentary over traditional painting. In reading art magazines I noticed that a number of young artists whose work I admired had attended a school called Atelier Lack in Minnesota. I applied to the atelier and was accepted.
At the atelier, we were not taught how to paint but how to see. We were told to observe nature accurately, to look at shapes, line, values and color. We were never allowed to throw paint haphazardly on canvas, but were instead encouraged to think about every square inch of the painting. We were not to produce photographic renderings of what we saw in front of us. Instead we were to make decisions all along the way: emphasize this line, exaggerate a color, manipulate a shape.
No matter what the subject or media, I strive to use good drawing and compositional skills to express the flow of light on objects. I am a painter primarily because I like the challenge of interpreting the world around me. But also because of Mo.”
Virginia Reilly Commissioned Artist
