Betsy Arvelo Buzbee
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I went to school to be an artist. That was my goal at the time since I found my mother’s tempera paints in her closet at age 4. I got my art education and started my painting career. Life had other plans for me and I just rolled with it. I can’t say I am disappointed with the path it led me to. I ended up in Altos de Chavón which led me to graphic design, silk screening, and an artist in residence invitation. Then that led to a solo exhibit at the Casa de Teatro in Santo Domingo. Next I came back to the USA where Tommy and I started Gráficas, our graphic design studio. This led to me founding the Mount Dora Art Gallery, which helped me get the job as Assistant Art Director at the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art. This then led me to traveling exhibits at NASA, Coleman Research doing illustrations for Strategic Defense which got me to Web and that brought me back to Florida and my first job as a Web designer. From there I have been an overall Art Director for several companies and magazines. These jobs didn’t leave a lot of time for painting. So, it went on hold. Through the years I tried to get back to it but, each time, something derailed the effort. The last one was the Magnolia series which was going great until I broke my hand. I am now trying to get inspired enough to start again.
Although I have worked with oils, acrylics, watercolors, ceramics, wood sculpture, and much more, I define myself as a water colorist. Watercolor allows me to be much more spontaneous than oils and acrylics and I also love the fact that it is so basic: you work on hand-made papers, with water based paints that are all organic and brushes made of real animal hairs. It keeps it all very close to nature for me. Natural paints and beautiful colors. Easy to travel with and very little preparation. I can walk away from a painting and come back months later and everything is still the same. I can sit and start painting again. Your palette dries out, you add water and your colors are ready to paint.
I start every piece by drawing in the shapes with pencil. This is to block in shapes. Then I do wet on wet to get the paints running into each other to create beautiful textures. After you have those textures in place, you start working areas deciding which areas to keep and accentuate, and where to cover them up. The painting starts emerging. Other than the wet on wet, I never mix colors. If I need to paint a purple, I lay down a blue layer, wait until it dries and then add a red one to achieve the purple. These coats or layers are done very minimally. I use very little color and add one at a time until I get the color I want. Some of the painting areas are made of hundreds of these layers. This is what keeps the colors so brilliant. Otherwise, they get dirty and muted. It is also a very lengthy process. I was very inspired by Maxfield Parrish. He worked this way with oils. Never mixing colors, doing glazes to achieve mixtures. His paintings are as beautiful and vibrant as the day he finished them.
