Artist Statement
A friend said to me recently, in response to a less than happy mood I was in, "Oh Bette, you are just withdrawing from your last painting…"
How well she knows me. When I am painting a new work, it takes over my life. I become an architect, a sailor, a people watcher, a gardener. I'm in the parks painting the trees! I build up the color in layers and glazes until it's just so and I am satisfied. I am "there"!
It’s like re-visiting a scene of an impression I have carried in my heart and I am driven to acknowledge its power over me as I attempt to capture it in the future of that present inspiration. I become fully involved until its completion. My sense of loss is only satisfied when I begin the next new painting.
I love comparing my completed works with the experience of giving birth to my five children, always mindful they were born to leave me, never owned by me, merely on loan just long enough to watch them grow into themselves and find their places in the world. To share them with the universe has always been God's intention, even as the sharing of the talent I've been blessed with and putting it "out there", so to speak. To me, that is the true celebration of the "Joy of Living", for it is in giving that we receive…
Bette Lesher