Tanya Beyer (Virginia, MN) Mixed-media watercolor.
I was lucky enough to have grown up in two beautiful rural regions including the Canadian north shore of Lake Superior. I also had elders who read to me, showed me book illustrations and wild leaves out beyond our house, and fed a variety of birds. At age 12 I became a birder by follower two older family friends down a local roadway where warblers and vireos were breeding. Memory of this compound beauty serves to compel me to reproduce it by my own hand and partly trained, partly self-taught technique, on the very portable medium of watercolor paper.
I hope that art about the wild world will help to incite people in power and otherwise to protect tracts of wild land and the animals and plants living there.
I appreciate detail and the minutiae of live things’ structure I feel the importance of showing detail. I work mostly with small brushes and pencils, wet and dry, on cotton watercolor paper which nicely allows for that detail.
My completed artworks serve partly as a reminder that I had the delight of seeing the species pictured in a pose and a place similar to how the artwork shows it. I only paint species that I’ve actually see firsthand, in nature. Available works of my art can be visited at www.epiphaniesafield.com