An Interview with Barb Hartsook

My interest in all things art-related goes back to my little girl days of Crayola crayons, kid-safe scissors and paste, and all the scrap paper I could find. I remember loving the splashes of color in my grandmother's English-style gardens, and how pretty everything looked when the sun was low in the sky and made patterns on houses and tree trunks. When someone asked me my favorite color, I said yes. My mom used to tell people my favorite was red. She didn't seem to understand my answer - I loved them all!

I had three uncles who made their living as artists, and I wanted to do the same. But my parents had other ideas for my education. So, sadly, art was not my major when I headed to college. It was considered play…

When our girls were small enough to need daily naps, I kept an easel set up in the basement, and while the washer and dryer did the laundry, I played. With oils on canvas I copied my favorite artist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, from a small pocket-sized book of his people-paintings. And of course, I painted Van Gogh's Sunflowers - very badly - with watercolors. My dear husband made frames for my work, and we hung them in our small house on all the available walls. Crayon drawings hung in the girls' rooms.

My girls and I painted on rocks in the back yard, drew on the sidewalks, cut up paper and fabrics and pasted and drew and painted and sewed… One year we took a Christmas Holiday to Florida and so didn't buy a tree. The girls and I designed one with all the trimmings out of colored papers and foils and taped the six-foot- tree to the wall. I always tell people I didn't really raise my kids - I played with them as they grew up. We danced and tumbled and learned the piano together. And I sketched them whenever they sat or stood still long enough.

Then life got pretty busy with 'real' work, and for many years my art supplies sat and dried up. All I managed to do was a few portraits in conte pencils as I continued to study faces and contours, lights and shadows.

About five years ago - my girls all grown with children of their own to play with - I reinvested in oils and watercolors and found some local classes to take, painting landscapes and flowers and still lifes. But I really wanted to paint people's faces.

So one day I typed "portrait artists" into Google and searched. I found a site that offered classes in oil portraits done digitally, and I pored over every word, link, and posted painting. I took the on-site class a year ago this month and came home addicted to painting with pixel-pigments.

Eight months later I found the PaintOutsideTheFrame and PainterTalk forums, whole communities of painters and classes and new friends, and it's been there that I am learning so many more possibilities with the Painter program and feeling very at home. My addiction is still growing.

Who are my favorite contemporary artists?

…Many are here in the Painter forum communities. Others include John Lovett - wonderful watercolorist. Also Jan Fabian Wallake for her pouring watercolor method. I like Pat Dews' mixed media abstracts. And Jan Kunz and Charles Reid for watercolor Portraiture. (Though I don't paint either's style, I do love their paintings.) There are others whose work I admire as well.

My favorites from history…

…are the French Impressionists of the late 1800's - not just for their style and use of color and light, but for their courage to step away from the commonly-held cultural view and acceptance of art, to paint what they saw and loved and simply had to paint! I believe digital artists today are at that same point, just in a different history-time-slot.

My favorite Painter Brushes?

…Oh no! That's like opening the biggest box of Crayola Crayons and asking me to pick just one. Every time I pick a new Painter brush and see what it will do, I get excited and have to play with it. I don't have a favorite yet… I'm still experimenting.

Where do I want to go with my painting

I've loved watching people's faces for as long as I can remember. There's drama in all of us, and it shows when we are not conscious of it, but simply living it. An observant artist sees it and paints it. To me that's what painting is about... catching the drama.
I said earlier art was not my major in college. My husband agreed two years ago that I should retire from actively helping him with his business to pursue some of the passions I put on hold for these many years. I accept that I'm not 22 and just beginning my professional life. I'm 65 and beginning again. The past year I have written my own curriculum, as if I were back at school, taking only courses that interest and inspire me.

I have written a poem - in the loosest sense of the word - that defines pretty well who I feel I am and where I want to go as an artist:

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