Today we’d like to introduce you to Tanya Beyer.
Hi Tanya , can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
A lot of the formative details of my life from its beginning have lent themselves to my becoming a visual artist–old, well-educated parents who taught English and the humanities, art books and classical literature in the home, classical music, abandoned farmland and old woods in two settings that surrounded us where we lived. My childhood was secure, the elders were magnanimous, kind-hearted, experienced, wise and spiritually attuned. I received some formal art training during my teens, then again took a watercolor painting class at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design ten years later.
I grew better and better able to support myself in my art career by hourly wage jobs in various call centers while selling my art cards and some originals at local fairs and festivals. For a decade I sold cards from an Etsy shop, which led to a couple of commissions. Now in my retirement from wage-earning I have made a happy and sustaining marriage to a rural husband, which lands me in the countryside in northern Minnesota, a day’s drive away from my family’s summer home in Ontario, Canada, so that I’m lavishly surrounded in natural beauty with little or no travel time needed for outings to add to my body of artwork.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
My domestic life has not always been fulfilling. I spent years as a single, but singledom is not a state I’d naturally choose. But I had difficulties that I would describe as mainly practical, like tight cash flow and struggle-ridden single motherhood.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Because I like to walk and pedal and paddle to get around the countryside, I’ve chosen to work in portable, minimally toxic art media like watercolor, fine-line ink and colored pencil. I do mostly small or mid-sized, easily transported art on paper. This has meant that I can carry the original artwork into the outdoors, then when it’s finished, scan it myself so it’s reproducible on prints or as note cards. These media lend themselves to the richly detailed style of drawing and painting that I’ve felt driven to develop by working in the field, in the full magnificence of thickets, prairies, lakesides and rocky shores. I draw what I see, resorting to combinations of photos for animal anatomy when I’m painting a bird or other creature that I’ve seen. I will always draw the creature in a pose about how I saw it, never painting an animal that I’ve never gotten to see in the wild. I think I am best known for this detailed style of reproducing in color what my human eye sees in a series of wild nature settings that I blend into an imagined scene on watercolor paper–the creature, or the flowering plant, flourishing in its characteristic habitat.
How do you think about luck?
Good luck is my emphasis, the darling folks who were my elders, who prepared a way that I could naturally take to as an artist. It hasn’t been easy or very lucrative, but I never imagined getting to be a highly-paid artist anyway, just one who’s able-bodied and healthy and free to live out a way of life that involves making art about this gorgeous North American continent in a wild state and putting that art out into the world among people who appreciate it, and the places portrayed, for all that they are. Being a maker of tributes to places and the fellow-creatures who I hope are able to survive human expansion on planet Earth.
Pricing:
- shown on my website
Contact Info:
- Website: www.epiphaniesafield.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tanya.beyer.wildlife.art/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tanya.beyer.wildlife.art
