Artist Profile

Artist Bio

I was raised in a household filled with art and have been painting for as long as I can remember. My father was a fine artist and commercial illustrator and my earliest memories are of watching him work and asking questions. He often asked for my advice, seemed to take whatever I had to say seriously and urged me to explore my own artistic interests, however, he actively discouraged me from pursuing art as a career so in college I majored in psychology and art history. Eventually, I returned to school to study art and received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin in 1987.

The driving force in my art is a love of nature. I am primarily a landscape painter and I mostly paint from memory. To me the concentrated stillness of making and manipulating marks on a canvas to create interesting layers, texture, and visual energy is a form of meditation. At times my work is pure abstraction; more often it is representational and occasionally I work with portraiture. Regardless of the subject or medium, I seek to explore many faces of the physical world and to capture the ephemeral nature of light at a moment in time that transcends the subject and captures a mood that is timeless. Each piece begins with a loose idea which evolves gradually and intuitively as I slowly build up the surface layer by layer letting each layer show through. This process helps add to the overall richness of the piece. I always have an idea of what I want to explore but I find that at some point the painting takes on a life of it’s own and I’m never sure where it will end up. Always, however, I strive to discover and convey the essence of the subject. With portraits, I try go beyond the surface to discover and portray the character of the person; with landscapes, I strive to create a sense of a time of day, an atmospheric mood or a place to create exciting, thought provoking visual metaphors that celebrate the incredible beauty and diversity of our world. Quoting Claude Monet, “I would like to paint the way a bird sings”.

I have been exhibited widely in both juried and invitational exhibitions in Wisconsin, Washington, DC, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia and now in North Carolina including such prestigious galleries as the University of Wisconsin, The Milwaukee Museum of Art's Bradley Gallery, the Maryland Federation of Art's Cardinal Gallery of Art, Annapolis, MD, the Goodyear Cottage Art Gallery, Jekyll Island, GA, Bev's Fine Art, Raleigh, NC and the Ambleside Gallery, Greensboro, NC. One-woman shows include two at Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria, Virginia where I was Artist in Residence for a number of years before moving to North Carolina in 2004. I am a member of the Pastel Society of North Carolina, The Orange County Artists Guild, and The Durham Art Guild. Gallery representation includes the FRANK Gallery, Chapel hill, NC, the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough, NC and Island Artworks, Ocracoke, NC. My work hangs in private collections across this country as well as in Europe and Asia.

Please visit my website: loletteguthrie.com. I maintain a studio in my home so please call 919-933-2931 or email me at using the contact form below to make an appointment or for further information.