Megan Perkins

About the Artist:

Megan Perkins is an artist, teacher, and native of the Pacific Northwest. She works primarily in watercolor with a love of color and expressive line. She has exhibited at the Chase Gallery, Terrain, The Confluence, Gallery One, and the Jundt Art Museum among others. She teaches at the Spokane Art School, Northwest Museum of Art and Culture, and the Corbin Art Center. She is most well known for her Artist’s Eye on Spokane series, which was started during a year-long project of painting at a new location in Spokane every week for 52 weeks. She loves to travel to new places and paint their landmarks and landscapes for fun. Most recently her work has been featured in Trending Northwest magazine and on PBS’s Northwest Profiles. Her work is in private and public collections across the United States.

Artist Statement:

The world is a beautiful place, but most people don’t notice that beauty. I use my artist’s eye to capture what I see so I can share the loveliness of daily life with others. I want my work to make people wonder at the world like they did as a child and to remind them that there are opportunities everywhere to be grateful that you alive and a witness to the day unfolding, even in quotidian things.

Process:

Megan loves to draw and paint from life on location, but also often works from photos, especially when making larger paintings. Her plein air practice feeds and inspires her studio work. She starts with small thumbnail drawings to work out her composition and then moves to small color studies. She will then make a drawing at the full size of the proposed painting, transfer it to her watercolor paper, which is taped to a board, and begin to paint the final piece. If her final piece is going to be larger (16” x 20” and above), she will often make a smaller version of the painting after the drawings and studies are completed to “work up” to the larger size since watercolor doesn’t have much of a margin for error.