Sandra Offutt
20 Bellevue Drive
Port Townsend, Washington 98368
Telephone: 360.379.9270
Oil painting
Demonstration:
I will be painting a plein air scene on the deck outside my studio or I will be doing a larger painting based on a plein air sketch.
Directions to studio:
From Port Townsend, drive south on Discovery Rd. Turn right on to Cape George at the Discovery Bay Golf Course. Proceed approx. 1.5 miles to left on Bellevue. Driveway is first one on right. Walk down sidewalk to house, then upstairs to studio (no handicap access).
Artist statement:
Painting out of doors puts me in an immediate and ever-changing relationship with the subject I’m painting. Questions come quickly “on site.” I wonder what it is about the light and time of day that make me want to spend a couple of hours trying to figure out why the scene is so appealing. Am I in love with the season, the trees, the water, the slip of sun through the fog, or the dew on the grasses? How simple can I make the painting and still portray what attracted me to the scene? How can I paint all this intuitively, without thinking about these questions?
Painting in this way draws on all I’ve learned: growing up in many parts of the country and Japan and Panama; doing graduate study in philosophy, religion, and psychology; working and living in Greece, Germany, and Washington, D.C.; being a wife, a friend, a mother; daughter; studying painting with many fine watercolorists and with oil painters George Earl Fox, Robert A. Johnson and Diane Ainsworth.
Geography has a role in my paintings, too. I live in Port Townsend, Washington, where it’s mostly a blue sky heaven in the summer and many shades of green and grey in other seasons. My spiritual home is an Aegean island in Greece, where I spend long weeks when I can, seeing bright, bright light and deep rich shadows — thinking about them when I’m not there; trying to bring some of that simplicity and sharp value change to winter still life.