Featured Artist Stephanie Aarons

Painter Stephanie Aarons presents a stunning collection of abstracted landscapes filled with dynamic color and light. Visit her website to see more of her art.

 

 

I was good at art at school. I always found it easiest to express myself visually, and still do. But when I arrived at art college, I struggled with the expectation to be “trendy,” “alternative” and “experimental.”

 

 

Although I left college with a respectable degree in Fine Art, it wasn’t difficult to decide in my early twenties that a complete change in direction was what I needed.

 

 

Since I’d always loved travelling, I ended up working in sales, then marketing and design management for a major global airline for the better part of two decades. That gave me the opportunity to see and experience the whole panoply of cultures, sights and wonders from around the world, yet still express my creativity.

 

 

As fate would have it, a major life change in my forties saw me relocating from London to just outside a small “Pueblo Blanco” (white village) in a stunning corner of rural southern Spain. From my studio deck, Morocco’s Atlas Mountains punctuate the horizon. They are framed by the rock of Gibraltar and the glistening Mediterranean Sea.

 

 

It was from that vantage point that I was compelled to pick up my brushes again. This time, though, I was mature enough to fully appreciate the amazing opportunity. I had the time and freedom to create whatever I wanted, surrounded by the most inspiring and gorgeous landscape imaginable. Energised, I threw myself back into my painting and haven’t stopped since.

 

 

I’m fascinated by contrast and texture, and by the juxtaposition of a very controlled mark with a completely spontaneous one. I use both impasto and glazing techniques in a relatively limited palette, but enjoy the jolt of intense colour added as an accent or an underpainted layer.

 

 

I’m drawn to abstract painting, but almost always produce something that references the landscape to a greater or lesser degree. My watercolours start as preparatory sketches. This is a way of working out scale, composition and a colour palette before transferring my ideas to canvas using acrylics on an often heavily textured background. Now, I find I enjoy using watercolour as a medium in its own right too. I offer these for sale along with my canvases.

 

 

Private commissions form a surprisingly large body of my work. Often clients will be drawn to a particular work, but want it at a larger scale (2 x 1.5 metres is my largest yet!) or with a slightly different colour palette. I get great deal of pleasure seeing these in situ after the fact.

 

 

I feel truly humbled that my work is deemed worthy enough to appear in both corporate and private collections worldwide.

 

 

Artist Stephanie Aarons invites you to follow her on Instagram and Facebook.

 

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