Painting of the Day, November 24, 2011

By Donna Poulton

“My paintings reflect my fascination with the beauty found in the interaction between perception, painting, and the natural environment. Beauty is created when a composition achieves a balance within the tension between contrasting forms and stylistic representations.” -- Woody Shepherd 

Credit: Woody Shepherd

Woody Shepherd, Beaver Mountain, 2008, oil and acrylic on hardwood panel, 90 x 80 in.

Woody Shepherd studied at RISD and Yale before accepting a position as Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. Woody explains that the formal elements in his work “are manipulated to generate the cerebral activity. Various contrasting transitions and combinations between formal elements such as light and dark, warm and cool, fast and slow, and rough and smooth, directly affect human emotions such as happy and sad, good and evil, anxious and calm, and sarcastic and serious. The array of forms functioning together thoroughly accesses the spectrum of human emotion.”