PAINTING A STORY

by LIESEL SCHMIDT / photography by HOLGER OBENAUS

he first time i realized and really saw that people responded to my art and that I could make them laugh and feel happy when they saw it, I was in sixth or seventh grade,” Dennis Fulbright says in his thick Georgia accent, launching into a tale that seems to hold importance to the trajectory of his career, even in its ordinariness. “As a kid, I’d always been a huge fan of Jack Davis, from Mad magazine—he was a Georgia boy like me—and I loved how expressive he was with the caricatures in his drawings. This one particular day, we had a substitute teacher, and of course, any time a substitute teacher showed up, it was all fun and games in class. So, I was sitting in the back, drawing caricatures with a graphite pencil and showing some other kids around me. We were all laughing, and the teacher came back to see what was going on. She grabbed the paper out of my hand and said, ‘Gosh, this is really good!’ and held it up to the class. It was upside down, but everyone loved it.”

In the 60-odd years he’s been painting, Fulbright has come a long way since those adolescent drawings, though he’ll outright tell you that he still can’t sit still without a pencil in his hands, working on something—even if it’s as simple as a doodle on a napkin in a restaurant. “It gives me an outlet,” he explains. “It’s not a passion, it’s an obsession. When I go out to eat, I am always looking for a napkin to draw on, which often delights the waitress along with the tip. These sketches have even resulted in free meals and drinks.”

Those hands have been busy professionally producing paintings since the Toccoa, Georgia, native graduated from the University of Georgia, where he earned a degree in landscape architecture and environmental design. His skills in watercolors were put to use in commercial art, first by creating architectural renderings for firms throughout the Carolinas and Georgia, and he made a long and prosperous career of bringing life to the renderings of his projects. As successful as he was painting landscapes and architecture with technique and attention to detail, it was only a matter of time before his talent became recognized in the art world. After retiring in 2015, he turned a greater focus to transparent watercolor and entered a number of juried shows in the Carolinas and Georgia, for which he won awards. He has been featured at the Piccolo Spoleto Outdoor Art Exhibition in Charleston twice and will be at the 2023 event.

“My design ability and my eye for design have made me a successful landscape architect, as have my understanding of proportions and the way I see things,” says Fulbright, who paints from the studios in both his Charleston and Cleveland, South Carolina, homes. “There are seven basic principles and seven basic elements of design, and I think that’s the same for art. If you incorporate some of those in a painting, you’ll have a successful piece of art. As I paint today, I still strive to incorporate four or five of these elements and principles of design to produce an aesthetically pleasing or an artistic painting.”

An artist who considers his paintings to be stories, Fulbright loves to paint the back roads of the Lowcountry and the Appalachian Mountains. “It’s fantastic scenery, but it’s also a way of life,” he says. “When I paint, I’m telling a story, and there are some real stories to be told in those little old secondary roads, stores, houses. You can imagine what life was like then and now—and the hardships that were part of that life. You can see and almost feel the hardships. It’s painting something that has occurred. It’s a happening.”

With a style that blurs the line between impressionism and realism, Fulbright depicts landscapes and seascapes, with architecture often incorporated to “help develop scale and mood.” His medium of choice, transparent watercolor, is one that creates a much different effect than the heavier oils or acrylics so often used by artists. “Transparent watercolor is a method of painting that allows light to penetrate through layers of watercolor pigments and reflect back through them, giving the color brilliance and luminosity,” he explains.

Through that brilliance and luminosity, Fulbright creates paintings with life and vibrancy, regardless of whether those paintings are figurative, landscape or architectural. Fulbright recently won first place in the Forgotten Coast en plein air in the open class, a quick draw competition. *

Liesel Schmidt lives in Navarre, Florida, and works as a freelance writer for local and regional magazines. She is also a web content writer and book editor. Follow her on Twitter at @laswrites or download her novels, Coming Home to You, The Secret of Us and Life Without You, at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.