Emerging Artists | Tatyana Fogarty

Tuning in to color and melody

Tatyana Fogarty, Spanish Bay Trails, oil, 12 x 16.

Tatyana Fogarty, Spanish Bay Trails, oil, 12 x 16.

This story was featured in the November 2018 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2018 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

Tatyana Fogarty was just a young girl when the luminous white horse in Joaquín Sorolla’s painting THE HORSE’S BATH first caught her eye. Throughout her childhood in Russia and Ukraine, Fogarty periodically encountered the impressionistic painting in the pages of her schoolbooks, and each time, she found herself dazzled by the Spanish painter’s masterpiece. It wasn’t until decades later that Fogarty stood before the painting in person, at the Sorolla Museum in Madrid, and understood its underlying brilliance. “I grew up knowing it as a white horse, but you look at the colors, and there is no real white there,” she marvels. “Now that I have studied Sorolla’s work and have seen his work in shows, I understand how he does his whites, and it’s amazing how many colors they have.”

Since she began painting in 2008, Fogarty has also become increasingly attuned to the nuanced palette of nature itself. Though she has studied with acclaimed artists like Kathleen Dunphy and Scott Christensen, some of her greatest lessons in color have occurred while painting en plein air around her home in Sacramento, CA, and particularly along the Pacific Coast. Boats, piers, beaches, and coves are just a few subjects in Fogarty’s oeuvre that have allowed her to plunge, metaphorically speaking, into chromatic studies of water and its rippling, reflective surfaces. The artist’s aquatic scenes come in many shades of blue and beyond; in REFLECTIONS INTRICACY—which won an award in a recent PleinAir Salon competition—water seems to eddy, shimmy, and shimmer with life in loose, expressive brush strokes ranging in hue from teal to purple.

Fogarty’s interest in painting water is partly born out of her longtime admiration for 19th-century Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky’s dramatic marine art, but she is equally at home portraying California’s cityscapes, architectural structures, and wilderness areas. When working en plein air, the artist paints to the tune of birdsong, rustling leaves, and crashing waves, and in her studio, she listens to everything from Tchaikovsky to Creedence Clearwater Revival while she paints. In this way, each of her brush strokes is infused with its own kind of melody. Fogarty, who studied piano for eight years during her youth, finds that fitting. “My art—and art in general—is visual music to me,” she says, “so it all comes together.” —Kim Agricola

representation
New Masters Gallery, Carmel, CA; Blue Wing Gallery, Woodland, CA; www.tatyanafogarty.com.

This story was featured in the November 2018 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2018 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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