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MIDDLEBURG COMMON GROUNDS
Orchid is a stunning watercolor
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Photos courtesy of the artist.
alking through Gayle Isabelle Ford’s farm house in Brightwood, Virginia, illuminates the passions that drive her spirit—animals and art.
Pictures of horses, dogs, donkeys, cats, birds, and even Highland cattle capture the irresistible appeal of these two- and four-legged creatures, which Gayle renders in soft charcoal, graphite, watercolor, and oil paint. Texture and precision are two hallmarks of her tactile style. “Ophelia,” a blueeyed ginger tabby rendered in pastels on a two-dimensional surface, has fur so soft that you want to reach out and touch it. “Truth be known, my real love is drawing,” said the Virginia artist, holding up a detailed pencil-on-paper drawing of a beetle. A beetle? Turns out a friend-of-afriend, Elsie Freshner, was married to an entomologist at the Smithsonian. Elsie prodded Gayle to draw bugs. “She wanted me to go into scientific illustration, and her husband gave me a moth and a beetle to draw,” Gayle said. “This was the beetle.” The work, called “Richard’s Friend,” is so lifelike that the pad of your finger can almost feel the grooves and lumps of a hard, scaly skin that covers the coleoptera’s back and six appendages— details you’d probably overlook were an actual live beetle to scuttle across the floor. Nor would you take in the symmetric pattern of organic shapes that decorate its back, or details like the claws at the tip of its spindly legs. But it’s horses that have always been a large part of Gayle’s life. In one drawing, a gray horse jumps over cross-poles set high, and the rider’s eyes look up as she firmly roots her heels down. “Gotcha was a bucker. He was hot,” said Gayle of the thoroughbred depicted. “I can remember riding him and the wind was so strong it lifted me off the saddle. But we clicked, and my two daughters and I loved him to pieces. We all rode him and all had our injuries with him.”
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Portraits of her children, animals, and landscapes of Colorado chronicle Gayle’s life. “Morning Sunlight,” a watercolor, snapshots the Colorado hills which surrounded her for 23 years. Wind flutters green and golden leaves from a copse of Aspen trees. “Misty’s Stall” is reminiscent of Brandywine artist Andrew Wyeth’s dramatic use of light in its study of contrasts. Seven vertical planks lie shadowed beneath
Go Green Middleburg | Autumn 2020
