Award-winning oil and watercolor artist Beth-Anne Fairchild has an affinity for color, often preferring to “punch things up” in ways that others might have a hard time even imagining.
But after viewing her work, it would be hard not to see and appreciate the vibrance of the world around us.
Fairchild, who was a member artist at Gallery 14 when she lived in Vero Beach, is the featured artist at a solo exhibition through Jan. 30, “Waking in Paradise,” at the Fifth Avenue Art Gallery in Melbourne.
“I’ve known that I wanted to be an artist since I was a child,” says Fairchild.
Born in Vermont, Fairchild moved to Florida 50 years ago, after being in a serious car accident while driving home from work at a ski area.
“I came to Florida for the warmth and to heal from that accident, and I’ve stayed here ever since,” she explains. Most of that time has been spent in the Melbourne area.
She was finally able to follow her dream of becoming a professional artist after taking an early retirement from her job of 28 years as a State Farm Insurance agent. However, all throughout her life, she attended workshops with well-known artists around the country.
“I didn’t get serious about it until I actually left my business. I was a single mom running a big business. I couldn’t really do my artwork and be a mom at the same time,” Fairchild says.
“Let’s face it. You cannot really make a living being an artist unless you’re doing art that’s for a specific project or person. Very few artists make it just as artists. I didn’t want to go through all of the pain. I wanted to paint for me. I didn’t want to paint for anybody else, I didn’t do it to make money, I didn’t do it to build a career. It wasn’t my goal to be a famous artist or to sell a lot of paintings. It was more to paint the best I could paint for myself.”
Her best has also impressed others in the art world. She won an award for the very first painting she entered into an art show and has since been designated as a Signature Member of the Florida Watercolor Society and the Southern Watercolor Society, both enviable accomplishments.
In Florida, Fairchild says she has found a never-ending bounty of subjects to paint, from bobcats walking through her backyard to the myriad shapes and shadows that can be found in nature, such as breaking down the petals in a flower, one at a time.
“I don’t know what it was that drew me to art. I just always loved looking at objects and seeing what makes them up. When you look at something and see how the light hits it, that’s pretty much what my art is all about. It’s about light and shadow and color. If you put those three things together and tweak it a little bit, you can come up with something beautiful. I get caught up in my paintings – the color and the perspective,” Fairchild explains.
She is also not afraid to experiment with materials and ideas or looking at things from various perspectives. Fairchild says her initial foray into the arts was with watercolor, and once that was mastered, garnering awards and recognition along the way, she began to dabble in oils, which she finds easier than watercolors.
“If you make a mistake in oil, you can go back over it, and no one would know that you made a mistake. If you don’t like the composition or the color, you can redo it, whereas watercolor, if you make a mistake, you pretty much have to change the design to fix that mistake,” says Fairchild.
Fairchild has built quite the following over the years with her realistic paintings.
“People say they look like photographs, but they don’t, because they have colors in them that you wouldn’t see in nature. There’s nothing more exciting than a new tube of paint,” says Fairchild.
She admits that while she gets bored painting the same subject over and over again, her unique use of color is the one constant in her work.
“It’s more about the color than it is the object with me. I don’t paint what somebody says they want. I paint what I want to paint,” says Fairchild, adding that she feels that is the secret to her continued success.
Even her watercolors don’t look like traditional watercolors as she uses an intensity of color, adding, “I don’t water it down much. It’s more color than water.”’
Enamored of botanicals, she says, “I love nature. ‘Waking up in Paradise,’ that’s how I feel every day. I wake up, I see everything beautiful.”
As an example, she recalls seeing a spoonbill feeding in the lake outside her window on a recent morning.
“I was mesmerized by it and with the reflection in the water,” Fairchild said. “I’m always looking at reflection and how light hits things and the color too. I always think about how I can turn it up a notch, make it a little more exciting. Turn blue water into teal water to make it more exciting and more interesting.”
Fairhild adds that she also tries to paint from a three-dimensional point of view.
“When you look at my painting, you can see all the way around it. It’s the way I tweak that light that you see in a photograph. I do use photographs to paint from, but I’m always reminding myself that it is a photograph, and it is flat. I need to make sure that the viewer feels like it’s a 3-D object that they’re looking at,” says Fairchild.
“You’ll always know what’s in my paintings. I would love to be able to paint a little more abstract and a little bit looser, but I get caught up in the detail of how beautiful something tiny is.”
After living in Vero Beach for five years, she returned to Melbourne to be closer to longtime friends, having experienced a bout with breast cancer and also the loss of her spouse.
“Being an artist saved me through COVID and the death of my spouse. I was all alone.
“Then, of course, I was in isolation for my surgeries for breast cancer. It was a really hard time, and if I didn’t have painting to disappear into, it would have been a really hard year for me. It saved me,” she adds.
Fairchild says you can expect to see Florida seascapes, landscapes, botanicals, birds and boats in the show at Fifth Avenue Art Gallery.
“Everything that you love about Florida and what we call paradise,” she promises.
For more information, visit fifthavenueartgallery.com.
Photos by Kaila Jones and provided
