New Oil Paintings by Debbie Lavook

When Debbie Lavook was about six years old, her father took her to the Cincinnati Art Museum every Saturday for Saturday classes. She drew and painted in the halls of the museum among some of the greatest works of art of all time. Her teachers were the artists from the Cincinnati Art Academy.

In high school, Debbie developed a strong portfolio of ceramics, sterling silver jewelry making, fiber art, batik, sketching, watercolor, and oil painting. She was accepted into DAA, Design Art and Architecture at the University of Cincinnati.

Debbie became an art teacher and taught K-12 grades with joy. She studied the History of Art for a year in college then went to Europe for the summer and saw a huge majority of this art and architecture firsthand.

Among Debbie's favorite artists is Monet, for his water lilies housed at the Musee de la Orangerie. She also has great appreciation for Leonardo da Vinci. Van Gogh is her favorite painter because she loves to mix oil paint color on the canvas right out of the tube. She also loves Edward Henry Potthast, an American Impressionist. Now that she lives in the desert of the Southwest, she also enjoys Georgia O'Keeffe's bold simplicity.

Debbie is an oil painter. She uses glaze and the white of the canvas for luminosity. I adore sunset paintings, pack those colors into the sky and somehow echoing those same colors in the foreground. When she paints, she enters another world of meditation, where hours pass without her noticing.

Debbie also appreciates New Age beliefs, and she felt drawn to the high vibration of Sedona. She asks her favorite artists to teach her to paint and to paint through her.

Come see Debbie's new display of her work at the Sedona Artist Market, open seven days a week from 10 to 5.