Posted 12 years ago
toracat
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When I saw this I did not have a clue who she was, but she wrote a story on back of watercolor, and it was pretty, and also good framing so I bought! She has nice web site and now feel lucky to have found this! She uses bright colors and pen and ink on this! toracat
who is p. wiggins? any relation to guy wiggins?
Byline: PAUL WEIDEMAN
Priscilla Wiggins has spent the last 33 years painting
en plein air, in gorgeous wilderness settings. She has some
fun bear stories.
"The scariest time was one time my friends had packed me up into the Weminuche Wilderness up the Pine River, north
of Bayfield, Colorado," the artist said in late May. "I was camped there, and I'd caught and cleaned and cooked a fish, and the next day I went down to get water at the stream, and when I came back on the trail, there were great big bear tracks over mine.
"I was painting, and the flies were incredible that morning, so I was in my tent taking a break and eating raisins, and all of a sudden there was a bear coming right to my tent, which is pretty unusual, so I knew there might be a problem."
Black bears usually avoid human beings. Sometimes they're less careful when they're inebriated from eating lots of autumn berries that ferment in their stomachs.
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"I started banging on a pot with a spoon and yelling at the top of my lungs, but he just came and sat down right in front of the tent and started scratching himself. So I started visualizing seeing the bear's face in the tree trunks way in the distance. I was shaking like a leaf, but I kept holding that thought, and pretty soon he got up and walked way over there, and I could see him just like I was visualizing him."
Wiggins' beautiful landscape paintings show at Eli Levin Studio from Friday, June 4, through June 17. Some are in oils, and some are watercolors. She does the oils when she's car-camping and will be in one place for a while. Other times, when she is just doing a day hike or painting during winter sojourns on St. John in the Virgin Islands, watercolors are more practical.
"A couple weeks ago, I was on Comb Ridge in Utah, and it was beautiful, but the weather was so blustery, so I didn't set up my easel," she said. "But every day I hiked up and did watercolors."
Those are full paintings. Wiggins doesn't do studies, and she doesn't paint based on photographs. It's not that she's a purist or anything. "That's the only way I can do it, really, to tell you the truth," she said. "I have to be there. I have to smell the smells and feel the wind and hear the sounds, because I'm not really painting realism. I'm painting something about -- I don't know how to put it in words, but I have to be there."
When she was a little girl, Wiggins learned to paint in a program sponsored by Columbia University. She grew up in New York, New Jersey, and New Hampshire and then studied art for two years at Bennington College in Vermont.
"They don't have grades, and you create your own
program," she said of Bennington. "I took what was called Four Workshops, which included semester studies on color, form, base, things like that. That was my grounding in art, and I think it's partly because of Bennington that I feel I can do what I want to do. They taught us to be brave."
Thus the livelihood of living year-round out of a car-camper, painting ocotillo and prickly pear cactus, mountains and streams and aspens. (She talked with Pasatiempo from Colorado, where she has been painting the same aspen grove for three decades.)
She moved to Albuquerque in the late 1960s to attend the University of New Mexico, earning a bachelor's degree. In 1977, she made a decision. "I said to myself, I want to spend the rest of my life living outside and painting. It seemed like the land was getting destroyed, and I just wanted to paint the beauty that was left."
She prefers a French-made easel, a type that was recommended to her by a mentor, Santa Fe artist David Barbero (1938-1999). "It's the only one I've used for years," she said. "It's portable, and it folds up in a really cool way. It has some wire and duct tape, but it has lasted, miraculously, for probably 25 years now.
"Today I was using a big umbrella with a little knob you turn to attach it to the easel, and when the wind was coming up, I'd have to quickly reach up and grab it, because the wind would blow the whole easel on me. It's like that a lot in Big Bend (National Park in Texas), so even though the umbrella protects me from the sun, I do have to be ready to grab it, even if I have brushes in both hands."
She didn't always use paintbrushes. One painting in the Eli Levin show, South Rim With Clouds, shows some strong impasto effects.
"I do that," she said. "Actually for years I would paint with a palette knife, not even use brushes, so the paint would be really thick."
Wiggins was once struck by lightning -- but not while she was painting. During her many days spent in wild places, she has never seen a cougar. "But today there were some elk in the field that were so beautiful, and a hummingbird kept coming right up to my face, again and again."
And, oh boy, more bear stories.
She has paintings for sale at Laurel Seth Galleries and others toracat
Many artist call her the Queen of the High Desert" I am just starting to research her toracat