![]() We like to meet at a place that serves food. Q: Describe your ideal San Diego weekend.Ī: I have two daughters in Descanso, so a family gathering is my favorite thing to do on a weekend. A sweatshirt I have from a daughter says, “I intend to live forever. Still walking well and that I have “most of my marbles.” So, fellow artists, your art projects will extend your happy days. ![]() Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?Ī: The biggest surprise seems to be that I am 95, still driving and still painting. Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?Ī: The more you paint, the more you learn that will be helpful when doing the next project. As I continue to paint each day, I have learned something with each effort that I can draw on for a new challenge. Q: What do you find draws your eye now that didn’t before?Ī: Creating a painting is soul-satisfying for me and all things I view could have a good potential for a sale or to hang on my wall to enjoy. ![]() Nelson Rockefeller even bought a dozen for friends at $5 each. My best customer was a gallery in Palm Springs. There was a meeting on Shelter Island of museum gift shop directors from around the country and I took a sales booth and sold orders all over the country. The back and edges must be painted, a glaze put over the print, and jewelry findings added for pins, necklaces or bolo ties. By putting a lens over a small print and tracing around it, I get a good composition to glue to the lens. Q: You owned and operated Eyeglass Arte for 10 years?Ī: In the beginning, it was, “Do I throw these old lenses out or how can they be recycled?” I am on the mailing list for art galleries catalogs, which are full of miniatures of famous paintings from galleries like the Metropolitan Art Museum, Boston Art Museum, and Corcoran Gallery. The marketplaces and the music have been the basis for 40 paintings, and the memories that return as I paint bring me much pleasure. Q: Where are some of the places you’ve traveled over the years that fed your creativity the most?Ī: My 12 visits to Oaxaca, Mexico, have been the inspiration for many of my paintings - the scenery, colorful clothing and people. Before pastel can be added the paper has to dry flat under a sheet of weighted glass, for maybe a week. If it looks good, I leave it, but if not, I can use my next coat of pastels to correct it. The chalk lines are now black and sometimes even some gouache paint washes off and the paper color shows up in places. All I have now is a black piece of paper! I take this to the tub and gently wash the ink off the composition. When the painting job has finished and covered the paper, I then, with a wide brush, paint the whole paper and gouache with India ink. Next, I paint my gouache colors between the lines of chalk. ![]() I sketch my composition in pencil and then go over those lines with white, ordinary blackboard chalk. Q: How has your style evolved over the years?Ī: Though pastels and oils are my favorite media, I have in recent years been experimenting with a mixed media of gouache (an opaque watercolor), India ink and pastel, which gives a dramatic and pleasing effect on the surface of a colored Mi-Teintes pastel paper. ![]() I have used all media, but the color I put down may fade lighter as it dries. and sometimes lunch.”Ī: My style is primarily representational since I do many portrait commissions, but over the years I have used and tried different approaches from realistic to abstract, and with some humor, if possible. Her secret to reaching 95? “Clean living, high moral character and a glass of red wine with dinner. She used to visit the Museum of Fine Art in Boston as a kid, and as an adult, she’s made numerous trips to Oaxaca, Mexico, where the bright people and colors inspire her work. She lives in El Cajon and has lived in East County, where they had children and he eventually became an early president of Grossmont College, since she and her late husband moved to San Diego from Massachusetts in 1950. This method gives her work a bright, rich color and stark texture. She’s developed her own style over the years, using a mixed media process of pastel paper, gouache, India ink and pastels. Or, her artist’s eye will see the value in combining two photographs into one painting to tell a story.īurnham, 95, has been the Foothills Art Association’s featured artist this month, with paintings on display in its gallery from some of her earliest works to her more recent pieces. If it catches her eye, Phebe Burnham will take a picture and immortalize the image into one of her many paintings. ![]()
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