Gina Welds-Hulse

My art is my diary. Each piece stems from my imagination and expresses a day of happiness, loneliness, sadness, frustration or pain.  The viewer is able to take a glimpse into my life by looking at my paintings.  Whenever I paint I allow my hand to work with my heart. The canvas or paper is just a means of transferring my thoughts and emotions into brush strokes, color and movement.  I can go through a whole range of emotions when I’m painting. As an artist and art teacher, I strongly believe that the main purpose of the arts is for healing, they make life a more pleasant experience.  Art enriches people in their daily living.  My goal is to create paintings that will nourish, delight, and fill the mind with a sense of wonder.  Holding a brush in my hand becomes an extention of something within, a pouring out of myself, so to speak.  That makes me vulnerable in a sense, but my painting is really a wanting to give of myself.

Inspiration for my vivid and bright color palette comes from my native Cayman Islands, where coconut palm trees pervade the landscape and white sandy beaches stretch for miles dotted by quaint cottages of various colors and white picket fences.  I have been drawing and painting for most of my life. Also as a musician, some of my paintings contain expressions of jazz, other of serenity and calmness. My vivid, colorful work is representational, a blend of impressionalism and abstract.  I specialize in simplifying forms, utilizing color to express the essence of the subject matter.  Working toward simplification of ideas and form, objects or ideas are reduced to a few elements that compliment one another.