About the Artist

Michelle Wooderson paints and resides in rural Kansas.  As a farmer’s daughter, Michelle has taken cues from her father to leave the land better than the way she found it.  Along with managing the family farm, Michelle and her family are heavily involved in conservation and preservation of the nearly 2000 acres of land and its wildlife inhabitants.  As you can imagine, Michelle has no problem finding a place to paint outdoors.  She prefers to paint close to home and many scenes are painted repeatedly.  Some favorite locations are gravel roads, creeks, timber and Willow Pond, a favorite water spot located just behind her house.  

Michelle’s painting style involves building the painting from the ground up.  She literally starts with creating a textured ground surface on her panels or uses handmade panels covered with muslin weave material.  This texture will become an integral part of of the finished piece as Michelle then creates a washy underpainting.  After drying, Michelle then builds up a painting using dry layers of oil paint with bristle brushes, leaving some of the underpainting and texture showing through.  She takes a painting to a state of finish that she likes to call “untouched” instead of “unfinished”.  This way of painting relates back to Michelle’s love of the land, leaving the landscape as untouched as possible.  Just as Michelle honors the land with planting trees and flowers, she paints linen landscapes on her family’s many meadows.  Be it a tall oak tree she plants or a beautiful brushstroke she makes on a canvas, Michelle is leaving her mark for generations to come.  

Michelle paints in a mix of Tonalist and Impressionist styles, preferring moody, soft scenes.  Early morning and late evening scenes, rainy and foggy days and water reflections are some favorite themes.  She loves Spring when the wildflowers are blooming and late Fall when most of the leaves have fallen and the Earth begins it's long Winter rest.  Creating atmosphere and distance in a painting by blending, scumbling and glazing are some painting methods Michelle employs. Michelle loves to lead the viewer into a scene and then makes them want to stay, possibly conjuring up images from a childhood memory or a place to sit and rest for a while.  Michelle has painted to help her cope with her parents' dementia and Alzheimers disease and has found comfort in getting lost in the painting process. It’s Michelle’s goal to start a painting that begins a story that the viewer gets to finish. She wants you to walk into her paintings, linger a while or maybe even make you want to be in that exact spot on Earth, if even for a moment. If you own a painting of Michelle's she loves to know that the journey started with her love of nature, a little story and putting those first brushstrokes of paint on the canvas. The best part is that the journey continues and her paintings take on a whole new life in someone else's beautiful space.  

Michelle is a Michael Harding ambassador and her current color palette  is:

Titanium White 

Cadmium Yellow Lemon

Indian Yellow

Cadmium Red Light 

Alizarin Crimson (or) Alizarin Claret

Cobalt Blue

Ultramarine Blue

Kings Blue Light

Pale Violet

Viridian

Neutral Grey (N5)

Unbleached Titanium Dioxide

Yellow Ochre

Transparent Red Oxide

Raw Umber

Ivory Black