Artist: Linda Wesner

Linda Wesner, a realistic landscape artist, pulls her car to the side of a Delaware County road. She quickly takes two photos of a forgotten farmhouse. Bulldozers roar and rumble across the nearby farm fields, and surveyors mark roads in the rich soil.

Her passion for the past began in childhood on a farm in Central New York, where she was surrounded by traces of agricultural life. She fancied herself a Nancy Drew of local and family history, and was always hunting for buried artifacts. On bus rides to and from school, she observed the changing landscape, and filled her sketchbooks with studies of these images. When she received a Kodak camera for her tenth birthday, Linda was soon using it as an additional tool for observation and composition. She studied at The State University of New York, Oswego, where she earned her B.A. and M.A. in Art. While studying for her graduate degree in art, her love of the past was intensified by living in a local history museum in Oswego, New York.

Due to her husband’s corporate job, she has lived in the Midwest, South, and East, but considers Central Ohio her home. “I have a passion to express the solitude and untold stories in scenes that are rapidly disappearing to suburban development in Central Ohio. I invite the viewer to contemplate my impressions of forgotten paths and old agricultural and industrial buildings, and the unseen but felt presence of the people who used them. I firmly believe the past is never dead, but influences today and tomorrow.”

“My colored pencil work evolves slowly,” she observes. “As I study the image and build its form and texture on paper, I want to give the illusion of stillness yet suggest activity from the past. My paintings are done more spontaneously, because I want my brushwork to suggest the past’s fleeting imprint on the present.”

Linda Wesner is represented by Marcia Evans Art Consulting and Gallery, Columbus; The Gallery, Cazenovia, New York; Clayton Galleries, Tampa, Florida; Fogle Fine Art, Jacksonville, Florida; and GJ Cloninger, Morris Plains, New Jersey. Elected Member, Graphics Division, Hudson Valley Art Association. She is a Signature Member of The Colored Pencil Society of America, and a Juried Member of The National Association of Women Artists, Inc. Her award-winning work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, and is included in numerous private and corporate collections, including IBM, General Motors, Borden, Liebert, and Coca-Cola.

For more visit: www.lawesner.com