Catching up with Lucy Petrie, pastel artist
By Sara Buscher
Free Press Staff Writer
October 12, 2007
SOUTH BURLINGTON -- Lucy Petrie wanted to learn to draw. Although she had asked her husband, watercolor artist Mick Petrie, to show her how, watching him as he sketched wasn't especially helpful.
She picked up a copy of "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards, and carefully completed every exercise in the book. When her husband gave her a set of pastels as a birthday gift, she took a pastel class at a studio along the route she regularly traveled to visit her new grandson.
Two years later, Petrie was accepted into her first juried art show, was featured in the May 2006 Pastel Journal's "Top 100 Paintings" issue and elected as a signature member of the Pastel Society of America.
"I don't really believe in talent," Petrie says of her work, sitting in the small South Burlington office where she practices psychology. "I felt like I really learned to see."
In childhood, Petrie was surrounded by artistic people. "My dad was always cartooning. My mother actually taught middle-school art, and that was like a family joke -- the cut and paste; it wasn't art," Petrie laughs.
Her two sisters and husband are artists, about which Petrie comments, "from a psychologist's point of view--everything is driven by some unconscious motive."
Petrie works from photographs using a pair of 3X magnifying glasses to create her luminous pastel images, mostly of fruits, flowers and birds.
"Things aren't simple; they're very, very complex," she says, lifting a photo album from the coffee table and pointing to a picture of two ripe red tomatoes as an example. "They're not red; they're purple ... and black." Flipping to a water lily photo, she adds: "there's no white in this white flower."
What Petrie looks for while painting is "little bits of color," which she places next to other little bits of color to form a whole, finished object. Her studio is well-lighted and she's careful about what she wears while creating her paintings because, for instance, a red shirt would reflect back onto the piece, distorting the colors.
As a busy psychologist, Petrie has found something to counterbalance the intensity of her job; pastel painting is the latest activity in a list of passions, which includes teaching and bicycle racing. If there's a connection between psychology and art, Petrie says, it's the creative process.
"Some art comes very fast, and some pieces are labors of effort," she says. She'll hang a finished piece on the wall for a new perspective, and then "see a shadow is too blue," and take it back to her studio.
Petrie sets yearly goals for herself and will cross two off the list with the creation of her Web site and her first solo show, opening next month.
See Petrie's work in November and December at the Walkover Gallery in Bristol, at the West Branch Gallery in Stowe, or online at http://lucypetrie.com