michelle

Michelle Luddy says she was ten when she had her first oil painting lessons and began her focus on painting. “Looking back on childhood lessons makes me realize how important all our excursions into the arts are. My childhood and young adulthood were spent drawing from life pictures of all my family, my pets, and when I couldn’t get anyone to sit, the flowers and trees, making pictures outside on a beautiful day whenever possible. Those things haven’t changed for me.

After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1978 with a Bachelors degree in Art, I was forced into the business working world like everyone else and simply kept drawing and painting whenever possible from force of habit and love of my craft. I couldn’t get into the mainstream art job market, but I spent countless hours in all the art museums in downtown Washington DC , imagining myself like all the artists I studied, as deep in contemplation of the old masters as I could get. Finally in 1986, after moving out of the city and getting a car, my better judgement took over, and I began my forays into studying landscape. What essentially appealed to me was my place in the heritage of the American landscape tradition starting with the Luminists and the Hudson School and continuing into American Impressionism.

Michelle Luddy

Studio painting had ceased to have any meaning to me a while back, and it was only by immersing myself in the out of doors and the love of nature, that my work took on the meaning that I so wanted to give. Working outside, or traditionally, en plein air, I think painting is just everything I see, and everything I can paint. I know I’m not alone in thinking painting plein air is just true experiencing with a brush. It is not the same as taking a photograph and physically distancing yourself from the reality by going home and working in the studio. It is being in a specific space and time and making a piece of work at that time and space, and perhaps repeating the experience until the painting’s done, whatever the light is, as it flickers through the clouds. All the paintings for the show were created like that. At one point while I was working, we kept having a series of afternoon thundershowers. I would set up with a large beach umbrella over the easel, the sun bright and the clouds dynamic and paint as long as I could until the sound of the rain approaching over the mountains and through the woods alerted me to the coming storm, and I would grab the canvas and run to get it into the shelter of the truck. Those particular thunderstorms would come up so suddenly I couldn't believe it. I wanted to paint the quality of light and was concentrating on that, but not the storm itself."

Michelle's works entitled "West Virginia Landscapes" have been produced in Randolph and Pendleton Counties.

Some of the artist's work