Showcasing mawardarts.com

I am from a small farm town in the Pacific Northwest surrounded by wheat fields and rugged mountains.  I exchanged those mountains for the skyline of New York City when I was twenty.  My internal landscape is immutably shaped by both. 

I see beauty everywhere and love to create paintings that are beautiful and uniquely mine.  I take in-person classes, use on-line art teachers and books to develop my skill. So, I guess that makes me self-taught.

The craggy, chiseled mountains of the PNW and the skyscrapers and  canyons of NYC inspire my work equally.  Flowers, African and Asian wildlife, pets, the western Big Sky, wheatfields, barns, pastures, birds, the Greek islands and seas, the English countryside and more are subjects of my work.  They are filtered though my eyes and experience, and the subject become something new.

Acrylics are a great medium.  and I like to experiment.  I also use watercolors and gouache and mix them together.  More important than the medium, though, is what I feel when I view the image,  and how I can imbue the image with that feeling.  The art becomes more than the image.

Her name was Permpoon, from Thailand. My friend took this picture at an elephant sanctuary of this lovely old gal taking a stroll.