Shan Shui-- the image of ken mountain over kan water. It is an image of a spring at the foot of a mountain.

"Paint the ordinary in an extraordinary way. Don't just decorate, dramatize! Exaggerate motion and color, combine objective observation with emotional response." -- Margaret Kessler

The Tao of Art

Mountain and water-- Shan shui-- balance each other, harmonizing like yin and yang in Cheryl Petty's landscapes.

Cheryl Petty received a BA in painting from UCLA in 1971. Before that she lived in Long Beach, California where she graduated from Wilson High School in 1967. "Art was a large part of my early life since I was a small child," says Petty. Few paintings exist from her early post college period. Most were large acrylic or oil paintings of figures or urban landscapes.

Since moving to Dunsmuir, California, in 1992, Petty developed the Window Box Nursery in the Historic Downtown District. Espaliered apple and pear, climbing, and old fashioned roses clothe and drape every view of the long and narrow bick and tin walls to either side. The tantalizing sound of water beakons and lures one on to the private and magical hillside garden with the eternal bubbling spring happily splashing downhill, the image of the spring at the foot of the mountain.

Moving to rural Northern California opened a gateway to creativity that has been blocked by the myriad concerns of life in the city. Gradually the artistic impulse seeped back into the crevices and Petty soon started doing small format watercolor sketches of her surroundings and in the mountains.

Building the small replica 1920's style interurban waiting station as her studio and Art Gallery on the Window Box Nursery property in 2005 gave Bert the cat a comfortable place to live as well as a new focus for Petty's artistic efforts.

Artist Statement

Using the mind resembles using a camera. If one can achieve absolute oneness with what appears as the multifomity of the world, one can unify the fragments of one's mind and focus one's mental camera instantly to receive a clear and accurate picture of reality.

With the invention of the camera in 1830's artists were forced to evolve or become redundant in the face of the new technology. What had previously been considered the finest achievement, the hyper-realism of the academies, was now superfluous with the arrival of the photograph. Artists were propelled towards capturing that which could not be produced by the mechanical camera. French Impressionism errupted onto the art scene in the latter part of the 19th century.

Perhaps the most influential artist of our era, Vincent VanGogh was a prolific volcano, producing hundreds of drawings and paintings in the short period of his painting career from 1881-1890. More than almost any other artist, VanGogh struggled and succeeded in painting what he saw and felt. Hugely admired by his contemporaries in the movement, his drawings and paintings reveal keen observation and draftsman's skill. His approach to color, light and even the application of pigment to canvas was liberating and operated on the cutting edge of color optics science at that time.

The influence of VanGogh on my art is easy to detect. I would like to think that I am exploiting avenues of observation and development that were opened by him. Why accept the mere translation of color, light and shadow that modern digital cameras offer? Why let a camera decide what color the sky is? Or what sunlight glinting through tree leaves looks like? The human eye is capable of much more than that, and I try to translate that information into a compostion that energises and evokes memory and emotion from nature. This process unifies the overwhelming amount of information about a scene and focuses the mind to capture in the moment of the painting a clear and accurate picture of reality.