Edward A. Obermeyer
Artist
I am a teaching artist who resides in Virginia Beach, Virginia. As a wildlife artist, I enjoy traveling to Costa Rica each year and sketching, photographing, and just simply enjoying the birds, animals and plants indigenous to this magnificent country. These paintings depict my impressions of these experiences in a naturalistic setting. Like the Hudson River School artists, I am fascinated with nature and seek to glorify it in my work. The paintings reflect a strong desire to paint nature as I see it. I often choose subject matter that is very small in reality but enlarge it on a grand scale so that the viewer can take notice of these microcosms of nature in a way not normally available to them. The Costa Rica Series is my effort to document every facet of wildlife I have experienced. Most of the visual references for these works come from photographs and on site sketches of various subject matter. I have developed a complicated system of airbrush and acrylic brush strokes to depict the wide variety of textures and colors of tropical rain forest activity. Airbrush underpainting serves as a base for the hand painted images. Airbrushing is again used to soften the hard edge of the paint brushed images. This marriage of mediums produces a striking visual effect. I hope you will enjoy looking into my visions of the rain forest.
Communicating an awareness of the fragility of the rain forest to the viewer and educating them about the wide variety of plants and animals is essential in my work. My goal is to create a painting technique where I combine the airbrushed images with the paintbrushed images for a striking photorealistic effect. This is accomplished first in the drawing stage where I use the grid system to generate a strong drawing, which is the framework for the painted surfaces. Airbrush is used first for the blurred effect of the backgrounds and then these areas are paintbrushed for sharp contrast areas. The subject matter in the works are all paintbrushed and then layers of airbrush and paintbrush are placed over them. Rather than just do photoreal representation, I am now taking the Costa Rica Series into a more abstract mode by zooming in on the patterns of my subject matter and fragmenting the canvas into pieces of pattern, texture and light. The airbrush and paintbrush in the more recent works include dots of light that are meticulously placed for visual effect. This will eventually lead to canvases that will be constructions of abstract, yet realistic patterns of light and texture. Selection of subject matter is essential for the creation of a specific mood in the paintings, such as the blue frog below.