Femme de Zanzibar Painting

Jean McGuire is a Kansas City native who returned to painting a few years ago after a 40-year hiatus. She started her process by focusing on painting with her fingers, creating all the colors from five colors: red, blue, and yellow, black and white. As her work progressed and she started painting portraits, using brushes became a necessary part of her process. She loves the challenge of trying to catch a person’s personality or attitude in her portraits. The details that can be achieved with a brush makes the artistic shift well worth it. To keep things interesting, she started experimenting with the effects of spattering, or throwing, the paint in layers to create an interesting background for her work or to give the impression of an image. Almost all of her landscapes are begun using thrown paint, either as the entire painting, or as a launching point for the piece.