PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST'S HEART AND SOUL

Portrait of an Artist’s Heart and Soul

By Louisa Woodville

Orchid is a stunning watercolor

Photos courtesy of the artist.

Walking 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.”

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.

Discovery is a 18 X 16 oil

“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 the blinding light from an open window, a stark contrast to the painstaking detail of eleven horizontal planks in bright sunlight right-angled to them.

Gayle grew up in New Orleans. “My high school art teacher, unbeknownst to me, signed me up for this contest and got me this scholarship at the John McCrady art school, and I really had fun,” she said.

Misty’s Stall is a watercolor

Marriage relocated her to Burke, Va., where evenings meant classes in illustration, photography and fine art at Northern Virginia Community College. “Then I got a nasty divorce, and I had to break away,” she said, explaining her move to Loveland, Colorado. For 23 years, she was a staff illustrator at Interweave Press, where she perfected the careful detail that characterize her works.

“Orchid,” a watercolor, is one such example. Reminiscent of a Georgia O’Keefe, petals of an exotic flower unfurl, advancing into the viewer’s space. Unlike O’Keefe, however, Gayle’s details reveal every vein and nuance of the flower’s skin.

In addition to rendering still-lives, botanicals, land- and cityscapes, Gayle also fulfills individual commissions of people’s animals and, of course, people themselves. “Discovery,” an oil-on-linen of a raven-haired five-year-old examining a blade of golden sea grass, is poignant in the child’s nonchalance and beauty. “That is the grand-daughter of [dressage rider] Sylvia Loch. I saw her picture on the internet and I asked Sylvia if I could paint her, and she said yes.”

Gayle continues to paint portraits and fulfill commissions. “I could never give up creating—painting or drawing. My art and my horses are in my heart and soul.”