"In the Shadow of the Dove"
30" x 36" Oil
"Sister's Secrets"
30" x 40" Oil
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Sonya
Terpening lives in
Grapevine Texas and is an accomplished painter in both
transparent watercolor and oil. She has been painting
professionally for over 25 years and is noted for taking
ordinary events and turning them into extraordinary paintings.
Sonya does not remember a time when she was not painting or
drawing. “Art has always been a part of my life. There was never
a dramatic decision to become an artist, I just always knew that
was what I would do.”
A few years ago Sonya returned
to painting in oils after a 20-year hiatus of painting
exclusively in watercolor. “I began to look at some of my
subjects as an oil painter would, in opaque layers of light over
darks instead of in transparent layers of watercolor. Painting
in oils has given me a new way of expressing my art and has
added new drama to the watercolors. By switching between oils
and watercolors I feel that my art stays much fresher.”
“I had oil paints at the easel
by the time I was nine, and I was studying with a professional
artist in junior high.” In anyone’s life there is a pivotal
moment in which nebulous dreams coalesce into a concrete goal.
For Terpening, that magical moment occurred when her grandfather
sat down with a pencil and a piece of paper. “My grandfather had
artistic talent, but he was a farmer who rarely had time to
indulge his talent,” she says. “One day, while I was watching,
he drew scenes from his childhood in Chicago. The sketches were
done quickly and out of his head and it was the first time I had
seen that particular kind of spontaneity. I realized then
artistic ability was a unique and wonderful gift.” |
