Lighting the Darkness Painting

Sandy has been focused on painting the inner landscape of flowers for the last few years. She calls these works Floralscapes. They evolved during a transition from a career as a commercial illustrator to a discovery of herself as an artist. Teaching watercolor to students at Bellevue College helped redirect her focus as she explored various subjects and techniques of representational watercolor. She realized that immersing into the shapes, designs and patterns inside flowers and plant life was the subject that awakened her love of painting and gave her a chance to create a series of images of stunning beauty. Building layers of intense colors helped brighten the way through the dark and gray of northwest winters. Showing her paintings in the Northwest Watercolor Society’s juried shows qualified her to become a signature member in 2012. The initials NWWS now follow her signature on the Floralscape paintings and she's receiving multiple awards in the NWWS shows. Recently she was juried into the group Women Painters of Washington where she received a 1st place award in her first juried group show! A little art background… After earning a BFA in drawing and painting at the University of Colorado, establishing a career as an illustrator of educational materials, a self-publishing venture into cook books, and having 2 children, Sandy Haight was introduced to watercolor in a life drawing session. The facilitator advised her on supplies, introduced her to the medium and she was hooked. “I loved the luminosity of the paints so much that I continued to practice all my assigned subjects as watercolor paintings in my School of Visual Concepts illustration courses. As I got more and more familiar with the strategic planning and execution of a watercolor painting, I was expanding my illustration portfolio beyond the educational market. I love the sensuality of the medium, the glow of the colors and the fact that it can move and flow on its own while wet, intermingling with other colors. Magic happens.” Use of watercolor in her illustration work became part of her signature style. To be more widely marketable and contemporary her illustration style departed from the realism she had worked hard to master as a student into a more simplified, stylized, bolder look. Now as a teacher, she’s rediscovering the joys of building a nuanced painting, rich with built up color and texture as she launches her students into the same process of art making.