~by Rachel Berenson Perry
Artist Lory Winford talks about being in her “sixth life,” and she claims it’s fortunate that nobody asks exactly what she means. But the spirit of her latest life began with a move to her grandmother’s Nashville cabin in the spring of 2016 and the hanging of a shingle welcoming visitors to her artist studio. “My grandma was dear friends with Ruth Bessire [wife of early Brown County artist Dale Bessire] and knew a lot of the original artists and their stories.
“I’ve always wanted to be an artist,” she continued. “I went to my dad and he said, ‘I’m not paying for you to go to school to be an artist. I’ll pay for you to be a teacher, and you can be an artist on the side.’ But I always played with pastels and would sit on Grandma’s porch and paint whenever we visited here.”
With her warm brown eyes and friendly face, Winford’s hospitality makes every curious visitor feel comfortable. Her image-filled studio and country style cabin are conducive to lingering. Numerous repeat-visitors treat her like an old friend during the fall Brown County Studio Tours, an annual event that has included her studio for the past eight years. This year she has decided to take a break, as she experiments with a change in media. She’s decided to switch to oil paint.
Although primarily self-taught, Winford has taken workshops with Barbara Jenieke and Marla Bagetta as well as Carol Strock-Wasson. She identifies workshops through the American Pastel Society’s local chapters to determine what instructors are available. She also says that she learns a lot from reading Pastel Journal magazine.
Winford is open about her inspirations and generous with sharing her process. Until recently her paintings have been exclusively rendered in high quality pastels, displaying vivid colors and soft texture. Using 400 grit sanded paper to maintain the marks, she begins with a sketch using harder pastels, which she brushes with rubbing alcohol to fill in any bare paper. She then uses increasingly soft pastels beginning with darks and working colors throughout the painting. Inspired by French impressionists, she often places different color marks next to each other and leaves them unblended.
“Water and clouds are always a challenge,” she admitted. “You need to leave space for clouds and ‘tree holes’ and use different amounts of pressure to vary color saturation.” One way to keep herself from becoming complacent is to work on more than one piece at a time. “I can leave a painting for a while if I’m not sure what it needs. Then return to it with fresh eyes.” This past year she took an online abstract class just to try something different.
Winford’s artwork is predominantly representational. In addition to pastoral scenes featuring winding roads and weathered barns, she depicts close-up clusters of coneflowers or brilliant orange poppies, among other images in nature. Her attention to detail and accurate colors reveal her talent for gardening. To visit her studio is to also experience her elegantly landscaped yard, which encompasses two town lots.
“I just love painting landscapes and capturing the light that moves around a painting,” she writes in her Artists Statement. “Colors have always captured my interest, and I am always working on ways to have color speak out in my paintings.”
One of the challenges for artists, today as well as in the past, is marketing, or as some would say, “the business of art.” Some artists believe that marketing is easier and more accessible using the internet, but the competition to attract attention is fierce. Winford photographs and frames her own work and maintains a website at lorywinfordfineart.com
Whenever she questions herself about the quality of her work, Winford refers to one of her favorite quotes from well-known historical French impressionist Claude Monet. “My advice to young artists is to paint as much as possible, for as long as possible, and never to be afraid of painting poorly.”
“In other words,” Winford says, “Just do it!”
Although she sells her work directly from her Here’s Home Studio, Lory Winford’s paintings can be found in the Hoosier Artist Gallery on Jefferson Street in Nashville as well as Stillframes Art and Design in nearby Columbus.