by Jill Stefani Wagner

“Preserve Shadows” plein air oil painting   12 inches x 9 inches      See Pricing When we were down south, I headed out to a nearby nature preserve one day to paint. It was quite a thick jungle but I found a little clearing where the light was shining down on a swampy area. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking at it now this piece is almost abstract in it’s composition.   The next day we traveled to Winter Park (a place I had a preconceived aversion to because they outlawed artists painting on their city streets, even though they host [...]

“Seeking the Light” plein air oil painting   10 inches x 8 inches       See Pricing When I paint in a new location it often takes me a couple of days to get my sea legs. And even though I’ve visited Florida quite a few times, it’s still a shock to my system to go from the frozen white tundra of Michigan to the tropical warm hues of the south. And not only the colors change. The shapes, the atmosphere and the lay of the land are all different from my home turf.   So I start with small plein air studies to get [...]

“River Spikes” Oil painting    30 inches x 15 inches      See Pricing The six paintings in this series will be heading up to Tvedten Fine Art at the end of May. (But are available from my studio until then.) I’m looking forward to continuing on this new path… or waterway. ;o) ___________________________________________________________________This artwork was created on: CanvasMedium: Sennelier, Gamblin, Utrecht and Richeson Oil Paints [...]

“Into the Light” plein air oil painting   14 inches x 11 inches   See Pricing People who know me well are aware of the fact that I tend to be a bit of a pit bull. When I want to achieve something, I work endlessly toward that goal. Sometimes that can be seen as a negative trait, but I’ve always seen it as one of my strongest attributes.  What I lack in classical training, I make up for with dogged perseverance.   And in reality, I think anyone who has aspirations in ANY field has to put in the “ten thousand hours” to improve. [...]

“Promenade” Pastel Cityscape Painting   9 inches x 112 inches     See Pricing When I do demonstration paintings at my workshops, I rarely finish them to the extent I would in the studio. I’m more interested in teaching my students a new concept or technique than I am in creating a perfect piece of art. And, I don’t want to take up all of their painting time finessing my work. But I do bring in my practice examples of the exact same painting to show them what a finished piece might look like.   The painting above was done with a value under painting [...]

  No words. Take a look at just some of the beautiful pastel paintings from our UArt workshop. I’m such a proud mama!               [...]

  Oh. My. Its been a crazy couple of months. We took a little sun break down south for a couple weeks, I lead a pastel workshop, I worked on new paintings for the upcoming gallery season and practiced for my Pastel Faculty gig at the Plein Air Convention in a week. And of course I’ve made a few visits to my precious newborn grand daughter. Time flies. And it seems with all that going on, I forgot that I have an artblog to write!   I’ll start with the workshop. What a GREAT group of artists I had! Many were repeat students and [...]

“River Isle” Oil painting    15 inches x 30 inches     See Pricing ___________________________________________________________________This artwork was created on: CanvasMedium: Sennelier, Gamblin, Utrecht and Richeson Oil Paints [...]