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After not one but two successful art careers and a lifetime of drawing experience, I struggled to define what would become my art. An art professor once told us that you'll know you're an artist when everything you look at becomes a potential art project and while that advice served me well as a graphic designer and elementary art teacher, it fell far short when creating my own art. After exhausting my 'someday' fine art file refining my art skills, I learned to enjoy making the ordinary extraordinary but I could not consistently define what was extraordinary. Making art out of anything felt more like a cat chasing a laser pointer flitting from one subject to another illustrating that I could create art but not why I should.
You can't force inspiration but if you are patient, it finds you. A few early works were already showing the way but it took an additional fall walk through the woods for the confirmation. After looking out over the beautiful fall landscape, I looked down. I knew, at that moment, that a beautiful still life of nature's making had just been revealed and that inspiration had been my hiking companion for a very long time. The organic lines of leaves in their natural environment with the light of earth colors in all four seasons defined my extraordinary, my inspiration, or what I now call 'a purple leaf.'
I grew up in a small town in west central Indiana during a time when youth entertainment consisted of being outside, inventing daily adventures and being forced to return home only when the street lights came on. Walking through the woods was always a favorite time of discovery, wonder, and curiosity affirming an early love of nature. My comfort zone included morel hunting, fishing, rock skipping along the banks of sugar creek, and camping out in the family owned woods during the summer holidays. Nature is the extraordinary if you take the time to see. Frank Lloyd Wright said it best, "Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you."
A purple leaf in nature is not unusual but it is not common either. It is both a subject and symbol of my quest to capture special moments of beauty, of absolute wonder, and the overall serenity of nature in my natural still life artworks. The aesthetic beauty of leaves, diverse in types, shapes and colors, combined with the textures of earth, wood, water and stone, drawn in the colors of the earth is the inspiration behind exploring the woods and parks for additional natural still lifes, sometimes literally at my feet. I visually study the woods with my camera, barely remembering to look up to avoid running into the low hanging limbs, and have discovered an endless amazing, wonderful, unique and too often overlooked small world.
As a kid I explored the woods as a curiosity, an adventure, and developed a sense of wonderment. As an adult I walk through the woods for the physical exercise, the beauty, and the serenity. As an artist I walk through the woods studying natural objects, compositions, and conditions for the next natural still life or the one after that. I am a graphite and colored pencil artist inspired by the serenity of nature because I learned to see.

Thanks for reading

Pamela Clements