Read this Wildlife Art Journal article SUN BATH, 20 X 16 inches, oil on panel."In my quest to get away from rendering, I decided to not do an initial pencil drawing...instead I use a #4 flat brush and just 'knock it in'. Then I stand back and look at the lines that give me an idea if the placement of the subject matter, etc. feels right. You can't really do this with a pencil drawing as you can't see the lines from 10' back." By Adele EarnshawCOUNTERPANE, 24 X 48 inches, oil, (making debut at 2012 Southeastern Wildlife Exposition in Charleston), By Adele EarnshawWEATHER CHANGE, 20 X 20 inches, oil on linen. "This was another stepping stone piece," Earnshaw says. "I got great comments on it at the 2010 Waterfowl Festival in Easton which told me I was heading in the right direction."
By Adele EarnshawLAST DANCE, 24 X 48 inches, oil, (a piece painted for the 2012 Southeastern Wildlife Exposition in Charleston), By Adele EarnshawFLAMINGO STUDY, 10 X 9.75 inches, oil on panel. This work appeared in the 2011 Birds In Art exhibition.
By Adele EarnshawAdele Earnshaw painting at Big Sur, California (photo by Anne Garcia) YELLOW UMBRELLAS-UPTOWN, SEDONA, 10 X 8 inches, oil on panel, this work won the Curt Walters Award at the 2008 Sedona Plein Air Festival, By Adele EarnshawDREAMING OF RABBITS, 9 X 12 inches, oil on panel. " This was another stepping stone piece where I knocked in the underpainting behind the fox - liked it - and left it unfinished."
By Adele EarnshawTURANGAWAEWAE, 40 X 32 inches, oil on panel, collection of Lindsay Scott/Brian McPhun
By Adele EarnshawTWO FOR JOY (based on old English rhyme about magpies), 12 X 16 inches, oil, By Adele EarnshawIN THE WIND, 36 X 36 inches, watercolor (1989). Earnshaw's work has been juried into the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum's Birds In Art 18 times since 1989. "I've been rejected four times....but I understand I'm in good company." The Woodson has a couple of Earnshaws in its permanent collection.
By Adele EarnshawJACK, 6 X 8 inches, oil. "This little oil was a major breakthrough for me," Earnshaw says. "It was one of my first 'big-brush-stroke' painterly oils.I still like it so much, I use it on my business card." By Adele EarnshawTREE SPARROWS AT DRAOGON MOUNTAIN, 13 X 28 inches, watercolor, this painting appeared at Birds In Art, 2000 (see text for longer story about work),
By Adele EarnshawSOFT RAIN FALLING, 24 X 36 inches, oil on panel. "This is one of my favorite landscapes to paint. It's a scene in northern San Diego County." By Adele EarnshawCHIRACAHUAN SHADE, 24 X 12 inches, oil on two-inch deep Ampersand panel. Succulents are a favorite subject of Earnshaw's botanical exploration in the desert. By Adele EarnshawREACH UP, 24 X 12 inches, oil on two-inch deep panel, By Adele EarnshawDORA JACK: "I did another project in 2010 (right before Christmas) called 'The Square Dog'. Little 5" x 5" oils, similar to the 75/75 though these sold for more. I had fun painting them and they helped me understand how to paint 'painterly' fur."
By Adele EarnshawAnatomy of a painting from initial sketch to frame STRAIGHT AND NARROW, 8 X 19 inches, oil on panel. Her take on the Big Open of the West. "Every now and then I do a piece that gives me a little pang when it sells. This is one of them," Earnshaw says.
By Adele EarnshawEarnshaw's Reinvention: A Case Study For How To Succeed In A Down Art EconomyPainter Adele Earnshaw Puts Art Quality, Creative Thinking At Forefront Of Success Adele Earnshaw's 'Counterpane', 24 X 48, oil, a piece appearing at the 2012 Southeastern Wildlife Exposition in Charleston, South Carolina. By Todd Wilkinson
Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you. ~Māori ProverbAdele Earnshaw has found her true painting stride at the same time economic turmoil in the world is wreaking havoc. It’s serendipitous perhaps. Art, after all, is about transformation—of sunlight, material, substance, and occasionally, of artists themselves. “Hunger in the gut is not something you learn or can be taught. It is born of necessity. Either you have it or you don’t,” Earnshaw said recently from her home in Oak Creek Canyon outside of Sedona, a community in northern Arizona not far from the Grand Canyon. It’s an enchanting confluence of geography, encircled by Navajo sandstone cliffs that turn a glowing red with each dusk and dawn.
“Here in the canyon at 5,000 feet we have a pretty big creek with ponderosa pine, sycamore and oak, beneath which we often find tracks of bear and mountain lion,” she says. For those unfamiliar with this native-born New Zealander, Earnshaw is a transplanted Kiwi who has spent a lengthy stretch of her adult life in the US and is best known for her supple watercolors.
Born in 1949, her ties to the Asian South Pacific aren’t superficial. Earnshaw’s bloodline in New Zealand goes back six generations to when colonists from Britain came ashore and encountered the animistic Māori. Earnshaw was raised in Warkworth on the upper North Island. It is a hub for birdlife along the Kowhai Coast where the Mahurangi River empties into the ocean. Earnshaw, still thick with accent, immigrated to the US with her family, but her childhood in New Zealand imprinted an uncommon aesthetic that today is most discernible in her art.
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"Adele has always had the essential ingredients to be a successful artist—natural talent, passion, desire and tenacity. When she moved into oils she really hit her stride." —Lindsay Scott
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For years, she has made her home outside Sedona yet recently decided she would return to her homeland in order to reconnect with those distant creative roots. Going back some three decades, Earnshaw, a competent, “self-taught” artist, is known for painting animals and moody landscapes. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin and the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson.Necessity, however, is not only the mother of invention. In Earnshaw’s case, it has been a catalyst for reinvention, too. Converging events in the last half-decade triggered an involuntary change. It is, as if, her friends say, that she’s become a different artist—more daring and willing to take risks. The result has been an expanding body of work that is turning the heads of collectors and causing all viewers to pay greater attention to the vision of this painter who has sometimes slipped beneath the radar.
A divorce, a pummeled economy, and the decision to re-embrace New Zealand are prominent factors. But it was a fall—yes, literally a physical stumble—that forced Earnshaw to move out of her comfort zone. After breaking her wrist, which hobbled her ability to dapple watercolor, she switched mediums and took up oil. It coincided with the near crash of the financial markets in 2008 that, in turn, caused the commercial art market to seize up, jolting galleries, slowing sales for individual artists, and even causing some contemporaries to temporarily abandon their easel and sculptural work, taking other jobs to make ends meet.
  
Thrust into survival mode, Earnshaw made a bold move that has paid huge dividends. Her innovative redirection is perhaps a case study example of how artists can achieve satisfaction during periods of adversity. More than a year ago, Earnshaw launched a series that she calls “75 for 75” which involves turning out a small wildlife study in oil every day, using an economy of brushstrokes and making the pieces available for $75 through her website. The decision has not only, unexpectedly, ignited fierce interest in those works but led to broader collector interest in her larger easel paintings. On top of it, Earnshaw says, her career has entered a second more satisfying phase. “My goal has always been to produce credible work—by that I don’t mean necessarily from an income standpoint but in passing the scrutiny of artist friends,” she says.
Always treasured for her strong support of artist colleagues, Earnshaw’s friends say her own patience has yielded just rewards. “Her work is what I call authentic and genuine,” says the English-American artist John Seerey-Lester. “By this I mean one can tell by looking at her paintings that she understands her subject matter.” Seerey-Lester has experienced a resurgence in his own career. His large format portrayals of historic hunting and camping scenes in North American and Africa, all based on personal inspections of the sites, have won praise from critics and sportsmen.
 'Final Foray', oil
Back in the boom-boom years of commercial wildlife art during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the sales of prints brought painters under the wings of publishing houses, who advised them to "paint for the market", portayals of subject became formulaic. Paint cute; paint patriotic; paint wolves, elk, deer and bears because that's "what sells". Earnshaw and Serrey-Lester were among the painters who created lithographs to reach larger numbers of collectors, but it came with the tradeoff of not painting for oneself—not experimenting as innately adventuresome artists feel compelled to do. In Earnshaw's case, flashes of that feisty daring spirit inside flickered in her entries to the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum's Birds In Art show where her watercolors—and now oils—have been juried in 18 times. Seerey-Lester says Earnshaw has such a solid understanding of the artistic elements beneath her that she now is flourishing with the energy of improvisation.
“There are many artists who paint on location, but very few of today’s plein air painters are wildlife and nature artists,” he says. “So many simply take photos and don’t attempt to really paint from life and frankly it shows in their work. Over the years that I have painted with Adele, I have seen to ability to capture nature in a unique way blossom and grow. She’s become one of the most accomplished artists out there in her field and she deserves everything that success has to offer.”
The American animal sculptor Sandy Scott is a collector of Earnshaw’s work. Her favorite pieces are a group of 6 X 8s painted in South Carolina that hang on a wall in her Lander, Wyoming studio. One is an egret in flight set against an evening sky; another a small band of wild turkeys; the third a lonely road leading into the woods. “They capture the low country and although the paintings are small, they are powerfully painted,” she says, offering highest praise. “Above all, and like another fine painter who was a friend of mine—Lanford Monroe —Adele simply knows how to paint the animal into the scene.” Just as Monroe did during her life, Earnshaw’s painterly handling of subject appeals to men accustomed to masculine portrayals. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– "Above all, and like another fine painter who was a friend of mine—Lanford Monroe—Adele simply knows how to paint the animal into the scene." —Sandy Scott –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––No assessment is more valued by Earnshaw than that of her closet friends. One of those, Lindsay Scott , reflects back on the Earnshaw she knew in Arizona 30 years ago and how it was Earnshaw who convinced Scott, who thought of pursuing a career in biology, to take up painting and graphite drawing. The way that Earnshaw poured herself into portraying desert avifauna was infectious, Scott says, and it carries over into the field workshops she chaperones. “Even her early work always had strong, distinctive composition and vibrant use of light and color, which has only improved over the years,” Scott explains. “Adele has always had the essential ingredients to be a successful artist—natural talent, passion, desire and tenacity. When she moved into oils she really hit her stride.”
Scott speaks of the sisterhood of the Southern Hemisphere she shares with Earnshaw. As fate would have it, she has completed her own somewhat circular odyssey. The artist from Bulawayo Zimbabwe lived in the US only to settle down, probably for the last time, in New Zealand not far ironically from Hepburn Creek where Earnshaw, as an impressionable girl, first became smitten with the natural world.
During their years in the U.S., Scott speaks nostalgically of getting stranded in a snowstorm in a small Kansas town with Joe Garcia, sitting in a tavern full of truck drivers and doing still life studies of ketchup bottles; long evenings draining bottles of wine discussing whether it is better to be an “artist’s artist” or go for commercial success. Hunger fueled their determination not to compromise. Earnshaw, she says, is a great raconteur. 'Soft Rain Falling', oil "Those were the days when we had to share a pizza due to severe lack of funds,” Scott says. Earnshaw adds of the little pizzeria they frequented in Arizona where they rendezvoused after a full day of painting, cupboards bare back home: “We would actually share a tiny little pizza for one that was guaranteed to be delivered to our table in five minutes or we got a free one. We always crossed our fingers that they’d be late so that we could meet again for pizza. I think we met weekly for a month or more without having to buy a pizza. Once, when Lindsay didn’t have a proverbial pot to pee in, she bought me canvas stretchers as I was having problems with my hands trying to stretch canvas. I will never forget that act of generosity.”
Two women tracing their origins to lean years. Reflects Scott: “I feel most fortunate about our chance meeting in Sedona all those years ago, and it has been a great journey since then.”
Wildlife Art Journal caught up with Earnshaw and engaged her in an interview about her transformation, finding personal, critical and financial success in trying times and the decision to return to New Zealand. The Wildlife Art Journal Interview With Adele EarnshawWILDLIFE ART JOURNAL: You shifted to oil due to pain in your wrist, hobbling your ability for a time to continue painting in watercolor. What happened?
ADELE EARNSHAW: Before switching to oil, I was vaguely dissatisfied with my work. I knew I wanted to become 'more painterly' but couldn't see it happening in watercolor. Twenty years previously I worked in both watercolor and oil for a year or two, but dropped oil painting, as I felt too divided. I'd also been painting 'plein air' in oil in recent years....but only for fun....not to earn a living. I earn my living as an artist so suddenly becoming an oil painter was a scary move. What if my clients and galleries didn't want my oils?
WAJ: You didn’t really have a choice. It was either adapt or perish because you had to find a way of supporting yourself.
EARNSHAW: I joke that I broke my right wrist when the Painting Gods pushed me because I was a chicken - afraid to make the change. One day I was a watercolorist and the next day my wrist was splinted from fingers to elbow making it impossible for me to work in watercolor. But I soon found that when I worked vertically in oil, I could hold a brush and paint with a straight arm. Eureka! My broken wrist was just a simple fracture so it was only splinted for about a month - but took another couple of months of physical therapy before I could bend it again. It took about four months before my wrist was flexible - and by then I had gone over to the dark side and I was an oil painter.
WAJ: And do you have any laments about what happened?
EARNSHAW: I’ve never looked back.
WAJ: You're bringing some large pieces to the 2012 Southeastern Wildlife Expositition in Charleston before heading off to paint in New Zealand for several months. Two of the larger works are impressionistic and feature birds flying over a marsh, that have been popular with your collectors...
EARNSHAW: I'm bringing a work titled "Counterpane" (see above) that features a flying egret and another called "Last Dance" with multiple flying shorebirds. The title for "Counterpane" comes from an old song I learned years ago:
Day has passed in crimson splendour
Night has come with noiseless tread
And upon the darkening landscape
Soft her counterpane has spread....
 'Last Dance', 24 X 48 inches, oil
WAJ: How would you assess the creative mental space you were in as a painter. Were you fully contented as a watercolorist?
EARNSHAW: I can appreciate the way I painted transparently with strong, clear color, but my strength as a painter was in the composition and the idea behind the painting, not the medium.
When I first started painting, my goal was to paint something that looked like the subject matter. But as I developed as an artist, what I really admired about the work of other painters was the brush stroke.... the yummy thick color that combined with the right brush stroke gives you something that is rich and almost three-dimensional, something I could never achieve in watercolor. This combined with some of the 'cute' subject matter I painted, made me discontented. I didn't feel that I was fulfilling my original goals as an artist... "Respect of my peers" and "produce credible work". These two goals were, and still are, more important to me than how much I earn as a painter.  'Gulls', oil, one of Earnshaw's 75 for $75
WAJ: 75 for 75, particularly in hindsight, was an ingenious move, not only as a regular exercise in painting, seeking simplicity, and in giving yourself permission to experiment, but also it is perfectly suited to these market conditions. High-end collectors are still out there, but there’s been a retraction in the number of people willing or having the money to pay pre- 2008 prices. Your oil studies have been gobbled up. These pieces helped you survive through the transition between mediums.
EARNSHAW: The idea for my 75 for $75 project came after I read Malcolm Gladwell's book, 'The Outliers'. He says, "Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours’.
I'd been painting in oil for three or four years when I read the book. I was also aware of a group of artists who do 'a painting a day' and sell their work online. It was started (I think) by Duane Kesier but there are other painting-a-day-artists such as Carol Marine.
WAJ: So they existed as guideposts?
EARNSHAW: I could see how rapidly they progressed as artists once they made the one-a-day commitment. As I felt that I wasn't making much progress towards my goal of becoming more painterly, I challenged myself to paint 10,000 small studies. I didn't want these studies to be any more than learning exercises - and figured my galleries wouldn't be interested in 'unfinished' work, so decided to sell them through my blog and website. But I also have a commitment to my galleries and don't want to step on their toes, so I've been careful to keep these little paintings small (5" x 7") and nothing more than studies.   A few more of Earnshaw's quick oil studies
WAJ: How did you get the word out?
EARNSHAW: I announced on my blog and Facebook that I was going to do this so that I couldn't back out. My son, Shane [Rebenschied], had graduated from Art Center College of Design as an illustrator. Though he was trained classically in art, all his illustration work—primarily book covers for the major publishers— are digital. He was itching to paint again so he asked if he could join me in the project. It came at a good time as his freelance work had slowed down because of the economy, so he had the time.
WAJ: There are not many examples of mother and son collaborations…
EARNSHAW: We really had fun with the first project. We decided to commit to painting 75 pieces in 30 days. Shane works at home and has three small kids, so sometimes he had to burn the midnight oil in order to get his painting done. We painted and posted them online, hoping they'd sell to justify the time spent away from our 'real' work. It took a couple of weeks for things to get going, but by the end of the project we had people watching and waiting for the new work to be posted.
At the end of the month, Shane had sold all of his and I'd sold most of mine. But making money was not the motive for the project as it was not a huge moneymaker. We were compensated for our time and became better painters in the process. The little studies don't make any demands on me. They allow me to experiment and loosen up. If I find myself 'noodling'—painting detail— I wipe the painting off and start again....even if it means wiping off a good painting.
WAJ: And it’s now become engrained as an essential routine for loosening up in your day before you tackle larger works?
EARNSHAW: Now I'm hooked on starting each day with a little study. When my gallery/show demands aren't as great, I try to do one a day as I find I paint better for the rest of the day. Some months it is hard to do any at all but I try to squeeze one in so I don't lose the momentum. Shane's freelance work is busier than ever, so he can't always participate, but he'd like to. I've probably done about 160. I have 9850 to go. I figure that as long as I can offer a nice little study for a very reasonable price, they'll sell, which gives me the incentive to keep doing them.  Earnshaw painting at Big Sur (photo by Anne Garcia) WAJ: The process of forcing oneself to paint small with an economy of brushstrokes—and exercising restraint—what do you know now that you didn’t when you started?
EARNSHAW: I've learned a lot! First, that the type of brush makes a huge difference. A softer brush doesn't give me the nice, dimensional brushstroke that a stiffer brush makes so I switched from a softer brush (brights) to Silver Bristlon flats. Flats have longer bristles than brights. I discovered that if I 'lay down' the entire length of the bristles when I paint, I get an even more interesting brush stroke! I also found that a few choice brushstrokes of just the right mouth-watering color makes a painting so much more interesting - and it sells faster. I've discovered that I no longer have any patience with detail and the statement 'less is more' is true. The more I simplify the subject matter with fewer brush strokes, the more I like it. Maybe I'm just getting lazy!
WAJ: You mentioned the close relationship you have with your artist son, Shane. How he is able to give you an honest critique. Moreover, what is it like being a painter and watching her boy grow up and make a name for himself in art?
EARNSHAW: It was probably inevitable that my son became an artist. When he was a kid I was always pointing out color, value and contrast in the surrounding landscape and asking him, ‘If you could cut a piece of that cloud out and put it on a sheet of white paper, what color would it be?’
I've got a box full of watercolors of birds that he did when he was 7 or 8 - each with a price on the bottom. I had to buy them! By high school he was working seriously in watercolor and selling his work to people other than his mother. Fortunately, he had a dedicated artist teacher (an art teacher who was also an artist) who entered Shane's paintings in state and national competitions for which he got a lot of recognition. By the time he was in 11th grade, he decided to wanted to be an artist. Now he's a full-time freelance illustrator, doing primarily book covers for Penguin, Random House— all the major publishers.  WAJ: Did Shane toy with any other careers?
EARNSHAW: For a while, he seriously considered going into medicine. He had the grades and was highly motivated but I was ecstatic when he chose art over medicine....especially when he decided to go to Art Center. Our artist friend, Joe Garcia, graduated from Art Center so we'd been hearing about the school for years. As I'm a self-taught artist with only one watercolor class as my 'education', I knew earning a living as an artist would be easier for Shane than it was for me, if he got a first rate commercial art education. My only regret in life is that I didn't have the opportunity to go to Art Center. I suspect I attended vicariously through Shane.
As Shane and I are both self-employed artists, we often have long phone conversations, usually about art, while we're working. My art circle is different than his - so he sends me links to artists whose work he admires, and vice versa. I find that as we both grow as artists, we're coming to have a very similar taste in fine art.
WAJ: Does it cause you to reflect on your own childhood and what role parents play with kids that show a proclivity for art?
EARNSHAW: My early report cards always said (in New Zealandese) 'Dell loves her handicrafts'. I realize now that even as a little kid, I was an artist, but my parents didn't see it and it wasn't encouraged. In high school, my art teacher gave me a brochure for an art school and told me to talk it over with my parents. I tossed it into the trashcan because I knew the response I would get. ‘And how will you earn a living’?
My parents were positive and supportive but only when it came to practical occupations. If just one person had said to me when I was in high school, 'you could be an artist' - my life would have been very different. I didn't know I had any natural ability - but looking back, I see that I did. When someone finally told me 'you can be an artist' - that was all I needed to hear....and I was off. But as I always say, 'there are no ifs. There's no going back nor wondering, 'what if'. I mention this so you know why I was so elated when Shane showed an interest in art and why I supported his decision to become an artist 100 percent. It's really rewarding to be able to talk about the thing I love the most with the person I love the most.
WAJ: What drew you to watercolor. Your work effuses the spontaneity that is synonymous with the medium and it appears effortless and harmonized rather than feeling forced. If Adele Earnshaw were to describe the zen of watercolor, how would your prelude begin?
EARNSHAW: First, I've been a bit bothered by some of my previous answers....feeling that I'm coming across as an artist who thinks she's 'arrived'. Hope it doesn't sound this way and I feel like I'm just starting out with a very long way to go. But it's hard to talk about what I've done - in terms of length of time - without it sounding like I'm tooting my own horn.  'Dreaming of Rabbits', oil
WAJ: We can appreciate your modesty. However, the fact is that there has been a tremendous response to your work. Your paintings are in the permanent collection of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, they are in high demand and have been on national tours with other exhibitions. So again, why watercolor in the beginning and not oil or acrylic?
EARNSHAW: What drew me to watercolor? It was the only adult-education art class offered on the right evening (she isn’t kidding). Today, coming from the perspective of an oil painter, I realize now what I probably already knew back then....I was not a natural watercolorist. My friend, Joe Garcia, is a watercolorist. He says that sometimes he dances when he works (in w/c) but it was never this way for me. I am a painter, the medium was secondary. A few (The Roost, permanent collection Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum) are strong because of the watercolor application, but the strength of my best watercolors usually came from the composition, not the medium.
WAJ: As you say, you are your own worst critic and veer away from anything that would cause someone to accuse you of being derivative
EARNSHAW: Shortly after I started painting, someone made a comment that I was copying another artist. I was insulted when I heard this as it was (and still is) so important to me that my work be my own. I would rather be a bad original than a top-notch clone). So I made a conscious effort to move away from any technique that resembled his. He worked on wet paper, I worked on dry. His painting application was immediate, I layered and glazed. He used some opaques so I worked in 100 percent transparent color; he painted on 140lb paper so I switched to 300lb. This caused some important changes in my work - one being that when I switched to working on dry paper, I couldn't do wet-into-wet backgrounds - which I had always struggled with anyway. So I zoomed in on my compositions to avoid having to paint a background. Instead of painting a building with the world around it, I painted just part of the roof (with birds - again referring back to "The Roost" or "Santuario de Guadalupe"). As I turned out more paintings, the close-up compositions gave my work its own look and made it more identifiable as mine._.jpg "Adele Earnshaw's 'Two For Joy'") 'Two For Joy', inspired by the old English rhyme about magpies
So for me, there was really no zen in watercolor. The zen happened when I worked out the composition. The paint application was only a means to an end. Now ask the same question for oil! For me - that's when I feel like I'm painting intuitively, but it never happened in watercolor.
WAJ: How did writing your 2002 book, Painting the Things You Love in Watercolor, and putting your thoughts into words, affect the way you think about painting?
EARNSHAW: It took a year to write the book. Fortunately North Light has it down to a science, which made the process easier, but it was still a year of hard work and discipline. I appreciated the opportunity to think about painting - why I painted and what I painted....but as a 'how-to' book, it was also a 'commercial' endeavor. One day when I feel that I have enough credible work, I'd like to do another book, but not instructional.
WAJ: Your career has evolved profoundly since the days when you produced wildlife stamps.
EARNSHAW: I didn't really enter wildlife stamp competitions. I did the first three years for New Zealand's game bird habitat stamp (AKA duck stamp) but it was invitational.
WAJ: You’re heading back to New Zealand and will divide your time, in part, between there and here. You’ll, no doubt, be seeing a lot more of your friends, Lindsay Scott and Brian McPhun. In 2012, you’re even leading a painting holiday/expedition for artists who want to visually explore New Zealand. What is it that North Americans, particularly your fine art colleagues, perhaps take for granted about this continent and that’s become apparent to you as you’ve lived in the States?
EARNSHAW: The diversity of the country in landscape and animals.
WAJ: What is important for readers to know about who you are that other writers haven’t asked about, or elements that haven’t been included in other stories?
I'm agnostic....maybe even an atheist, but from the very first week of my art journey I've been pointed in this direction. I've had some strange things happen that have made my direction very clear. These things continue to happen (breaking my wrist, for example) so I take them as a 'sign' and head off on a new path that perhaps I wouldn't have thought of or didn't have the nerve to go. When I feel lost, something seems to come along that points the way. I just hang on and go along for the ride because I don't have a clue where I'm going to end up ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– "In my humble opinion, credibility is more important than money. Be original and pay your dues. Sketch. Draw. Don't be thin-skinned but remember a critique is only one person's opinion. Don't get stagnant. Evolve!"—Adele Earnshaw –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––WAJ: If you could impart advice to a young artist, what are some of the things that are important to know?
EARNSHAW: I'm still seeking advice for myself! But advice for a young artist just starting out? Make short term, long term and lifetime goals. In my humble opinion, credibility is more important than money. Be original and pay your dues. Sketch. Draw. If you choose to paint wildlife, use only your own reference and make sure that you research your subject matter. Second, artist friends are really important for inspiration, sharing of ideas, critiques, feedback. Don't be thin-skinned but remember a critique is only one person's opinion. Don't get stagnant. Evolve!
The 'painting gods' require sacrifices. I can count on my fingers the number of my female artist friends who have kids - most don't - and this hasn't changed much since the days of the Impressionists. I could write a lot more about being a female artist. Being an artist isn't an occupation - it's a life, and the saying, 'it's not the destination, it's the journey' is so true.
 'Tree Sparrows at Dragon Mountain', watercolor: "This painting was the result of a trip to Taiwan," Earnshaw says. "I was one of 12 artists from around the world (including Lars Jonsson, Carel Brest van Kempen, Joe Garcia) invited by Eco-Art of Taiwan to celebrate the connection between art and the environment for the millennium," Earnshaw says. "We exhibited our work at the National History Museum in Taipei and spent a week touring Taiwan. I was asked to give a speech on wildlife art at the Normal University in Taipei. Quite an experience for an uneducated artist! It was an experience of a life-time! I was invited because of my connection with Taiwan artist (who lives in the US), Anderson Yang." PHOTO CREDITS >> Finding your "love".Posted By kitty kelly on Jan 9, 2012 I now think I will go back to oils, which I have always loved, but got lost along the way with watercolour and acrylics. Adele showed me what I could not seePosted By Dan Williams on Dec 25, 2011 After retiring from the fire department and moving to Sedona in 1989, Adele showed me what I could do. I now live in Mexico and have been painting in water color for over 7 years. Thanks Adele A true teacher and warm caring personPosted By Lynnea Mattson on Dec 5, 2011 The lessons taught in Italy and now again shared in this artical have inspired me again. Thank you for push I needed. I will use them!! Thanks again Del and sorry I can't make it to New Zealand. |
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Finding your "love".