Teresa Saia | Open & Flowing

Teresa Saia finds an expressive visual voice through light, color, and form

By Gussie Fauntleroy

This story was featured in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art December 2019/January 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

WHEN TERESA SAIA signed up for a calligraphy class at a Northern California community college, she was young and looking for something to add a sense of purpose to her quiet life. Previously she’d pursued sciences with a focus on forestry, but she knew that field would likely involve living in remote outposts, and she and her then-husband were settled near Santa Cruz. So she enrolled in language and business courses and studied calligraphy with a graphic designer. Little did she know that the graceful lettering she was learning to do in black and white would soon blow open a door to extraordinary color and an award-winning painting career.

It started with a casual statement from the calligraphy instructor near the end of the course. “For finals, you’ll make a book and illustrate it,” he said. Saia (pronounced SAY-ah) remembers a moment of panic. “Wait, you didn’t tell us there was a prerequisite to be able to draw!” she protested. The instructor calmly looked out at the class. “Well, you’re just going to do it,” he said. And so she did. Saia set up still-life arrangements and started sketching and painting. When she turned in her hand-bound book, the instructor praised her work. He suggested she sign up for a drawing class and continue in the direction of fine art.

After that, Saia says, “Everything clicked. It was almost scary because it happened all of a sudden. One moment I didn’t know how to draw, and the next I could see value and perspective and depth.” She began painting in watercolor, later shifting primarily to pastels but also creating with watercolors and oils. Along the way, one mentor after another appeared at just the right moment to guide her to the next step. And while her medium expanded and changed, her visual voice—which from the start involved rich color and a sense of radiant light—has remained clear and strong.

MOST OF SAIA’S growing up was in the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco. In those days, what would later become known as Silicon Valley was still lovely with fruit and almond orchards. Her family was artistic, but the art she and her four brothers practiced was music—violin, piano, and cello. Teresa played the violin for eight years as a child but was never able to get past her stage fright, so eventually she quit. Still, her hands were always busy with creative projects. By age 8 she was designing and sewing outfits for herself and her friends. Following in her mother’s footsteps and using her mother’s ethnic cookbooks, she prepared exotic dishes long before ethnic food was popular.

Although she had no role models for painting, the family frequented art museums, taking in everything from abstraction to contemporary art. “I was fortunate to be instilled early on with a sense that art was very important,” she says. Her personal favorites as a child and teen were the California Impressionists. Yet her initial move toward forestry reflected an equally passionate interest in the California landscape itself, especially through backpacking trips she took in the Sierra Nevada. When she later discovered her talent and love of painting, it was natural that the landscape became her primary subject.

For 15 years after that experience in calligraphy class, Saia painted exclusively in watercolor, often taking her sketchpad and paints on months-long sailing excursions with her husband. Even in watercolor, she conveyed the landscape in sumptuous colors, including strong darks. Her work sold well. Then one day in 2000 she noticed a couple of artist friends working in pastel. “I thought, wow, that looks so fabulous!” she recalls. She began exploring the medium and marveled as it opened a whole new range of possibilities, including working with texture, edges, and even greater vibrancy of color. She remembers in particular a workshop with the late pastel painter Bill McEnroe. “It was only three days, but he was such a wonderful, giving person. He gave me a freedom that allowed something to be released in me that I’ve never forgotten,” she says. “Something just opened up and flowed, and I began speaking even more my own visual language through pastel.”

Today about three-quarters of Saia’s work is in pastel, and most of the rest is in oil. She uses hand-manufactured dry pastels, which contain no oil or wax, just pure pigment powder held together with a small amount of binder. Often she starts with an underpainting in watercolor, acrylic, or gouache before picking up her pastels. The results are mood-infused landscapes, waterscapes, and cityscapes in vivid, saturated hues, frequently rendered in a luminous, edge-of-day glow.

Over the years, the kinds of scenes that inspire Saia’s art have expanded. In 1982 she and her first husband traded their sailboat for a lot on Whidbey Island, across the Puget Sound and just north of Seattle. Following a divorce, she moved off the island, remarried, and painted in a downtown Seattle studio, maintaining that space even while living part-time, then full-time, back on Whidbey Island. The Seattle studio was an artist’s dream, she says, but in summer the heavy traffic for the ferry commute was more like a nightmare. Today her studio is downstairs in her home on the island, with beautiful water views of Deer Lagoon and Useless Bay (so named because it was too shallow for 18th-century sailing ships.)

As Saia walks her two Cairn Terriers along the Whidbey Island shore, or visits Washington’s verdant valleys, or leads painting workshops in places like Italy—stopping in Paris, her favorite city, along the way—she takes in elements of the landscape that have always spoken to her: curving waterways and formations of trees against vibrantly colorful skies. One such scene, WINTER SUNSET, was inspired by a familiar creek on a winter evening near her in-laws’ Ohio home. She began with a photo that offered a strong composition in mostly grays and browns, with warm highlights in the grasses. “I keep the ordinary but make it into something that expresses a certain kind of energy,” she says. “I began the piece, and the light started bouncing around, and I was picking spicy colors that pop against the warm yellows and violet-reds. Light is my number-one inspiration, along with color and shapes.”

That painting was juried into this year’s exhibition of the International Association of Pastel Societies, in which Saia holds the designation of Master Pastelist. (She also recently earned Signature Status with the American Impressionist Society.) The piece represents a direction she has enjoyed exploring in recent years, in which the abstract qualities inherent in her art are more apparent while still conveying a recognizable scene. It’s a more contemporary approach, incorporating bolder strokes and even greater animation in the bouncing of color and light. These qualities are especially evident in a recent series created after a short stay in Paris. Nighttime Parisian streets wet with rain provided the perfect conditions for breaking up light and color into abstract forms, she says.

A somewhat more traditional effect emerges in AUTUMN EVENING GLOW, in which a spectacular sunset is reflected in the still water of a marshy waterway in Washington’s Skagit Valley. The image captures the fleeting moment of brilliant color before the landscape slips into night. “Skies can add so much movement and depth,” Saia says. “I wanted that last light of evening. I wanted the viewer to be able to walk into the painting and feel that last warmth.” Such imagery may evoke a sense of the romantic for some, or perhaps a suggestion of mystery. For the artist, it’s an exercise in expressing what she sees—in its most potent form. “I love creating the essence of a scene and distilling it down,” she says.

This underlying goal allows Saia to move freely between multiple approaches. She may explore similar landscapes in a variety of mediums, each producing a distinctive effect; or she may focus on the many ways one medium interacts with a range of subjects. “It’s so important to keep it playful, to want to go into the studio every day and continue to grow and change as an artist,” she says, adding that collectors have expressed delight in not knowing exactly how this versatility will manifest next.

Saia also keeps her creative spirit alive through periodic plein-air painting excursions with artist friends. Because she is a studio painter, these trips are simply for the pleasure of being in a beautiful outdoor environment, painting alongside good friends. She allows herself the freedom of no self-imposed pressure to create anything to sell. Recent outings have taken her to such diverse landscapes as Carmel, CA, and historic rural farming communities northeast of Seattle.

Wherever the 66-year-old painter finds herself, her eyes continually seek out—and her pastels or brushes convey—qualities of calm and beauty she believes resonate with similar feelings from the viewer’s own experience. “Life is short and getting shorter, and I think it’s wonderful that we have these kinds of memories through the course of our lives,” she says. “If a painting tugs at your heartstrings or causes you to recall something beautiful, I’m glad.”

representation
Howard/Mandville Gallery, Woodinville, WA; Rob Schouten Gallery, Langley, WA; Scott Milo Gallery, Anacortes, WA; www.teresasaia.com.

This story was featured in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art December 2019/January 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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