About the Artist: A former Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) elementary school teacher, Emily started painting mid-pandemic as a way to destress after a long day in the classroom. Since then, she has turned her love for watercolors into a career. Emily finds inspiration from her time living in Guadalajara, Mexico as well as her childhood in Wisconsin. In addition to botanical watercolors, she also enjoys painting pet portraits. As a current resident of Madison, Wisconsin, she teaches watercolor classes and workshops throughout Dane County. Most recently, she creates watercolor kits so that everyone has access to the magic of watercolors from the comfort of their own home. Emily continues to give back to her community by donating a portion of the proceeds of her “Paint your Pet” nights to local pet rescues as well as donating watercolor kits to chemotherapy centers in Neenah, Wisconsin.

About the Artist:
One of an artist’s primary skills is knowing how to pay attention. We notice everything from tiny insects and bits of lichen to expansive skyscapes filled with sweeping clouds and sun pillars.
 The many moods of light and atmosphere are more than mere distractions. For me, this acute awareness of nature’s ephemeral treasures is soul-filling, and I have worked throughout my life to refine the expression of this experience. Artists spend hours improving their handling of favored media, here again “paying attention” to their tools and possibilities. Pastels provide me with a rich and tactile medium to depict Dane County’s wealth of natural environments, and I relish exploring the limitless abundance in our local prairies, wetlands, and forests. Wild and Precious, indeed.

About the Artist:
A former Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) elementary school teacher, Emily started painting mid-pandemic as a way to destress after a long day in the classroom. Since then, she has turned her love for watercolors into a career. Emily finds inspiration from her time living in Guadalajara, Mexico as well as her childhood in Wisconsin. In addition to botanical watercolors, she also enjoys painting pet portraits. As a current resident of Madison, Wisconsin, she teaches watercolor classes and workshops throughout Dane County. Most recently, she creates watercolor kits so that everyone has access to the magic of watercolors from the comfort of their own home. Emily continues to give back to her community by donating a portion of the proceeds of her “Paint your Pet” nights to local pet rescues as well as donating watercolor kits to chemotherapy centers in Neenah, Wisconsin.

About the Artist:
Exploring Sanda Steele’s online portfolio reveals her versatility across a range of mediums, including oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, color pencils, ink, and graphite. Each composition reflects her adept rendering skills and commitment to creating vibrant, harmonious visuals. Steele skillfully juxtaposes contrasting elements in her art, echoing the observation that life, much like her work, contains opposing forces. Just as clouds may veil the sun, a silver lining can always be found if one perseveres through challenges. Ultimately, Steele’s art aims to inspire hope and perseverance. It serves as reminder that beauty exists in the interplay of colors, patterns, and experiences, encouraging others to find their own silver linings amid life’s complexities. 

About the Artist:
Holly Hansen is an artist who paints for the dreamers, the tea drinkers, the book nerds, and those who want to keep their cherished memories alive. She is a scientist first by trade, but she owns an Etsy shop and is aspiring to become a live wedding painter.

About the Artist:
I am melancholic as a visitor in someone’s life immediately upon entering their kitchen. Theirs is an impossible world of histories that I will never fully understand. Stories that are hidden in the horseshoes hung on the walls, the photographs of mountaintops taped to the refrigerator door, and the hand-made “worry dolls” lined up one by one on the windowsills. I fall in love with these fragments that make up a person. I am confronted with sadness knowing that people change, and that I can only truly catch a glimpse of them. To cope with my experience of constant nostalgia, I recreate these objects by hand to develop worlds in which my connections can be tactile and long lasting. I want to feel at home in my work to reimagine these spaces as if they were our kitchen, with our stories. When I paint tiny photographs and sculpt golf balls and cowboy boots, I am no longer a visitor.

About the Artist: 
Art has always been part of my life, even when I was working in other fields. In recent years, I’ve returned to it more fully—almost obsessively—and found my home in printmaking working in a variety of mediums. I love the hands-on nature of it: carving a block, rolling out ink, and pulling a print. It’s messy, unpredictable, and always rewarding. Each print reminds me to expect surprises and roll with them, sometimes taking the work in a direction I hadn’t planned but often find exciting. I’m inspired by the natural world and the small, often overlooked moments close to home, and my hope is that my prints invite people to pause, and feel a moment of connection or joy.

About the Artist: 
I am an oil painter and high school art teacher residing in the Town of Berry, located in the Driftless Region of western Dane County. The focus of my art stems from the appreciation and curiosity I have for animals and plants. I attempt to imbue the subjects of my art with character and vitality so I might bring the spirit of Nature indoors. I enjoy experimenting with new techniques, and over the years my process has evolved into painting with oils on sheet metal. I juxtapose metal patina techniques with oil painting, resulting in work that features abstract textures and colors in the background and detailed realism in the subjects. I shape the metal for my paintings using a jeweler’s saw, and age it using a variety of different patinas. Working on metal gives my paintings additional dimension and provides me with the capability to create compositions that are free from the constraints of traditional geometric shapes.

About the Artist: 
Christy Grace is a multidisciplinary Wisconsin artist with a background in fine art, graphic design, face painting, and cake decorating. Grace embodies the concept of chiaroscuro, “Looking at my work and life as you would a piece of art - it would not be as interesting or display such depth without the joyful brights and twisting shadows.” This concept is present in her creations from the deeply personal fine art depicting chronic invisible illnesses and their effects on people, to the quirky, playful illustrations that can picture a narwhal drinking tea or an opossum in a tutu.

For this year’s call for art, featuring all things ‘Wild and Precious’, Grace looked into her multitude of photos of her daughter for inspiration. With the birth of her daughter in 2015, Christy Grace rediscovered her love of all things curious through the eyes of someone experiencing them for the first time.

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About the Artist: 
I observe and borrow imagery from the natural world as a way of exploring perception and discovery. My paintings use botanical silhouettes and landscapes to reflect on the environment as a symbol of vitality and fragility. I employ painted strips that narrow the viewer’s focus. A truncating of the grandeur of the vista allows us, perhaps, to notice it more readily. These interruptions of scene and entanglement with botanical silhouette invite contemplation, reminding us that we never see the full picture of any place, experience, or person. I am interested in what we do not see as much a that which we do - in the mystery of what lies just beyond view. Amidst the noise of modern life, I seek to distill moments of stillness and awe. My work is both an internal meditation and an external celebration - an invitation to pause, notice, and grow. Each painting is a quiet offering and a glimpse into the abundant, layered world we inhabit and the inner gardens we cultivate.

About the Artist: 
Since 1998 I have lived on a farm in the Driftless area, observing animals both domestic and wild, from which I draw inspiration for life and art. Educating about different species, showing the drama and how they exist in this rural environment is the purpose of making the artwork and this life.
These visual stories are told with Printmaking (woodcut or linocut) and Oils. I make big—up to 8ft—prints because it engages a wide audience, is a continual challenge, and ensures constant learning.

Since 2004 I’ve had over a dozen solo shows (including MOWA, Watrous Gallery) on themes of domestic animal husbandry, wildlife, and the relationships we and they have with each other. The work is in public and private collections across the US including MOWA, Woodson Art Museum, Epic Systems, etc. I’ve been represented by Abel Contemporary since 2005.

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About the Artist:
Dane County’s four bold seasons shape my work. Autumn, especially, turns every block into a gallery—reds, golds, and greens simply beaming. As a lens-based artist, I’m after more than documentation; I compose expressive statements about place and time. This photograph captures my backyard maple tree reflected at peak color on a pond, its surface stirred by a small waterfall. The moving water transforms leaves and sky into a painterly abstract mosaic.  After 45 years of calling Dane County home, I remain curious about its character—prairies, lakes, neighborhoods, and the quiet drama in between. My images celebrate this landscape, inviting viewers to linger in the mood of this remarkable place.

About the Artist:
As a Sōtō Zen Buddhist Monk, Pǎo Shan’s art and design work are a creative, physical manifestation of his meditation practice. Each piece is sprung from thoughts, concepts, emotions, and ideas that arise in the realm of intentional, “waking-consciousness,” and interpreting these perceptions and insights received by listening and meditating. Then, by going to hand-brush-ink-paper, Pǎo communicates this spontaneity in the perpetual cycle of creation and completion. His medium is Sumi inks, pigments, acrylics and collected objects, applied to hand-made Japanese Heritage Washi papers, canvas, papyrus, and other natural fiber mediums, with Chinese & Japanese calligraphy brushes.