Featured Artist Donald Hildreth

Artist Donald Hildreth paints dramatic impressionistic landscapes and portraits. Enjoy more of his portfolio by visiting his website.

 

 

I started out life as a curious kid who liked to figure out how things worked. Making art came much later.

 

 

After a ten-year career as an engineer working on rocket engines and aircraft braking control systems, I became a real estate investor. I bought and improved properties in the Southern California area where I grew up.

 

 

Around the age of fifty I found myself looking for a new direction, a new challenge. This is when “art” began for me. Browsing through a course catalog from Glendale College, I was hoping to find something that would pique my interest.

 

 

Being left-handed, I was thumbing through from the back toward the front of this rather thick catalog. I could not find anything until I arrived at the “A’s,” where art classes were listed. Hmmmmm…I saw a basic drawing class and decided to give it a try.

 

 

I greatly enjoyed the class and also found out that I was pretty good at drawing. But it was the painting class I took the next semester that really did it for me.

 

 

As soon as I picked up a brush and started pushing the paint around (with a purpose, of course), the lights came on and the orchestra started playing! There was no question in my mind that my world was going to change profoundly. And it has. Greatly for the better.

 

 

What is wonderful about making art, and in my case a painting, is that there is no single correct way to make do it. What is created has never existed before. The whole painting experience is remarkable. And as a bonus, there is no end to how much you can learn.

 

 

What do I want to paint? The short answer is: everything! People, places, people in places, water, rocks, trees, clouds, the sky, horses….

 

 

I am particularly drawn to the way light works; its color and the way shadows are cast.

 

 

All this is accomplished using oil paint and brushes on canvas in an activity that has remained fundamentally unchanged for centuries.

 

Artist Donald Hildreth invites you to follow him on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

 

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