Willa Vennema
Born in Greenwich Village, New York City in 1962, artist Willa Vennema has spent almost every summer of her life on Swans Island, located off the coast of Mount Desert Island, Maine. She and her husband moved to Portland, Maine 30 years ago to raise their children and to be closer to this magical island where Vennema derives her creative energy.
Vennema finds inspiration for her semi-abstract landscape works as she hikes the woods and boats along the rocky shores of the many uninhabited islands of the spectacular “Bold Coast”. Back in her Portland studio, Vennema relies on her memories of the deep blue hues and the bright diamond-like sparkles of the ocean, the granite rocks, and spruce covered islands to create her work. She lets the process of painting with the ancient and unpredictable medium of molten wax. influence where her paintings will go. The luminous and rich surface achieved by Vennema in her work entails a time consuming process of applying many layers of wax, and using various tools and materials to incise, scrape away, collage into and ultimately fuse through the use of a heat gun each layer of wax to the next.
Vennema has a BA in Studio Art and Art History from Oberlin College, Ohio, and a BFA in Studio Art from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NYC.
She has had numerous solo exhibitions and her work is in the collection of Southern Maine Medical Center, Southern Maine Community College, Avesta Housing, and hundreds of private collections nationwide.
"My work in the studio begins by immersing myself in the sensual aspects of the paint. It is magical for me the way color, texture, shape and line interweave and eventually tell a story. By layering and scratching away at the paint a surface emerges which seems to have a history; a sense of time past. Within this painted place, various subjects dwell." -Willa Vennema