Shari Southard

I am a plein air painter. ..I paint outside on location. I have an urge to engage with nature in this way. Not so much to capture what it looks like but to honor it. My paintings often happen as I’m hiking along the Oregon coast or in the Colorado mountains, in the deserts of Utah and the small towns of New Mexico. Rivers, gardens, forests and hills …whatever catches my eye and excites my soul. A place or a sound makes me stop to smell the air, view the view, listen to the birds, the wind, the bees, the water…. hear the land. The paintings become my visual journal, where I have been and what has grabbed my brush. These paintings are as if you are looking over my shoulder, seeing the world as I see it.