Trinda Love, born in 1947 in Port Townsend, Washington, is a painter, photographer, videographer, seminar leader, and spiritual healer. Love earned her BA in Literature from UW, and a Master’s of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences degree at UWT. Her Thesis Project, a video titled “Seven Puget Sound Artists, Romance and Realities”, can be seen at the UWT library.
Trinda Love, always interested in drawing and photography, started her art career in 1969 with pen and ink and watercolor drawings, gradually progressing to large watercolors. In 1999, after a painting trip to France, Trinda Love switched over to thick, impasto, knife-painted oils on canvas, and hasn’t looked back. Love often works from her original photographs. Love’s work has been exhibited in New York City, and in juried shows around the United States.
Trinda Love is pursuing her artistic vision in Tacoma, where she lives. She endeavors to find the natural beauty and spirituality of the Pacific Northwest by finding the Light in the everyday.
Technique:
After decades as a watercolorist, in 1998 I spent three weeks in Europe with artist friends painting on hand-stretched canvas with oil paints. Painting en plein air, (outdoors) where my painting idols—John Singer Sargent, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse–had worked was exhilarating
Coming home, due to indoor toxicities, I completely changed over to a palette knife. This was a smooth transition for me because my mother, Northwest Artist Pamela Love, had painted oils exclusively with knives.
I loved the thick impasto finger-painty feel of working in oils, cutting into the paint with a knife. When applying thick paint onto thick wet paint, surprises occur, and colors disappear, or reappear–kind of magically at times. This keeps me fresh.
Excerpt from a Martin Lieberman review in a New York Gallery & Studio Guide:
“Trinda Love is a painter enamored of nature. She has stated that she can be “transfixed by the light slanting low across the landscape, or by shadows dancing on the side of an old pickup truck.” For years, she worked primarily in watercolor, before discovering that “oil paints have a squishy, ‘fingerpainty’ touch.” In her recent landscapes, Love explores the capabilities of oil paints with the advantage of one who has mastered the spontaneity and freshness of aquarelle, applying the luminosity of the former medium to the substantial viscosity of the latter to affect a vibrant synthesis of the ethereal and the material.”
“Trinda Love is a painter who is not afraid to take bold liberties with nature in order to convey the intensity of subjective vision. In doing so, she departs somewhat from factual appearances in order to get closer to her own emotional response to beauty and convey a larger truth. The trade-off pays lovely dividends in her vibrant canvases.”
