“I do a lot of mark making first with charcoal, and then I will often add water or a wash
on top,” she says. “That’s when I start layering with paint. I use long brushes in different
sizes, so I come up to the paper kind of like a bullfighter. Once I apply the paint, I step back
to take a look at what I’ve done, and then I go back in.”
Vineyard began her career in education, teaching at the elementary level. While she
credits this work with allowing her room to stretch her artistic wings, she was encouraged
to take workshops and courses, carving out precious time for her passion for painting and nonobjective art.
After her move to Wilmington, she connected with a small group of unique artists called Diverse Works who
are devoted to nonobjective, “left of field” art practice.
“When I moved to Wilmington, I started out more traditional, and got more abstract as I went along,” she
says. “The oysters played a big part in my development. Abstract art is abstracting a form — like my flower and
oyster paintings. And the next step is to abandon the form altogether; the nonobjective work I’m doing now.”
In abandoning form, Vineyard allows emotion, thought, and feeling to guide composition. In a painting
titled “Threads of Life,” Vineyard builds a winding, almost chaotic scene out of layers of white, gray and black.
Connecting this central gray-scaled element to the corners of the canvas are bright, hardly wrought lines of
green, red, orange and yellow. The effect is an organized and intellectually arousing tension.
Here, Vineyard contemplates time and considers the many threads that compose our experiences — includ-ing
Begone, 30 x 30 inches, acrylic on canvas.
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VINEYARD likens her creative process to the dance-like battle of the matador.
to pursue teaching in lieu of the studio art degree she wanted.
“I taught elementary art and took additional classes and workshops during the summertime. I was always
involved in art, making bedspreads, clothes, anything creative,” she says. “But I never had the luxury of painting
anytime I wanted.”
She later worked full time in real estate and raised four children, but never forsook her art. Vineyard contin-ued
a personal one that impacted Vineyard and her piece.
“A friend of mine died recently, and it was such a shock because it happened so suddenly,” she says. “I real-ized
that my paintings have a lot of threads in them. In life, we weave in and out of many threads, some joy,
some disappointment. Friends weave in and out, and then the thread breaks.”
Vineyard starts with a feeling, thought, or inclination, but not always a specific or guided purpose. Instead,
she allows her knowledge of art
and composition to give visual
form to an often-intangible
feeling.
“It takes a lot of concentration
and knowledge of the elements
of art before you can start work-ing
non-objectively,” she says.
“I don’t have a preconceived
idea. When I start a work, I
choose color first. I’ll start draw-ing
lines with black — marker
or graphite — then I start paint-ing,
and it goes from there.
Sometimes it takes revisiting a
piece over and over again. I work
on several canvases at a time to
make a series; I often start on
one and work to the next one
and go back and forth.”
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