Leaving Her Mark

Tara Will brings modernist ideals to traditional landscape painting.

by Elizabeth L. Delaney

Maryland painter Tara Will makes art that stokes the senses while conjuring up a curiosity about the arrangements of lines and color populating the surface. Rather than attempting to pro­duce a polished or romanticized view of the American West, she elicits the beauty of the landscape via collections of abstracted and dynamic strokes, lines and contours that engage the eye as well as the mind.

Influenced by a range of artists from abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell to commercially influenced painter Wayne Thiebaud to heralded portraitist Nicolai Fechin, Will harnesses vivid colors, reduced shapes and a sense of spontaneous mark making to create what have been called “unapologetic” paintings of the landscape.

Will grew up surrounded by art. Not only did she take art classes throughout her secondary schooling, but she also worked at a gallery and frame shop where she learned how to care for and present artwork of all kinds. She majored in art and philosophy in college, but after graduation put art making aside. More than a decade later, after giving birth to twins in 2011 and growing her family to four children, Will decided to make time for her art practice again.

Will began her fresh chapter by enrolling in a pastel class at a nearby community college. Using pastels was new for Will, and she quickly embraced it. “I just fell in love with the medium,” she says. “It’s so immediate. It’s gratifying to see it develop so quickly.”

She began participating in plein air events as she continued to fine-tune her pastel skills, and around 2017 she was invited to her first established juried exhibition. Two years later, Will made her first significant trip out West. She hadn’t previously spent much time in the region, but she immediately felt at home and inspired by her surroundings. “I fell in love with the canyons,” she says. “Zion is probably my favorite place on the planet. I really connected to the fact that it’s so abstract. The color, the light-it’s just so different from what I’m used to at home.”

Will continued down that path, frequenting the plein air circuit, until 2020, when COVID-19 caused art events—and the world in general—to shut down. After having to be at home for a while because of the pandemic, Will discovered how much she liked working in her studio. Although she had found excitement and fulfillment traveling to plein air events and building professional relationships, she realized that she had gotten everything out of it that she could. Will pulled back from the constant rotation of applying to and attending faraway events to focus on studio work.

She continues to hold plein air festivals in high regard and will always harbor a great fondness for them. “It’s great to meet wonderful people, and the camaraderie with your fellow artists is fabulous,” Will says. “That’s probably the thing I’ll miss the most.”

Will didn’t lose her desire to paint Western landscapes and share her work with others, however, and in January 2023, she made her first appearance in the highly revered Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale in Denver. “It was such a cool event,” she says. “The caliber of work was exceptional.” She especially appreciated the “roundness” of the exhibition, which included a variety of mediums, styles and artists.

Although not as frequent, travel to new and beloved places to gather source material is still an integral part of Will’s creative process. Some of her favorite places to paint out West include Sonoma, California; Sedona, Arizona; and Utah’s Zion National Park. She is most often drawn to the clarity of light and color found in the Western landscape and is fascinated by the dramatic mountains, buttes and other natural land formations. When she’s back East, she finds intrigue in places such as Cape Ann, Massachusetts; Providence Canyon State Park in Georgia; and the rural areas around her Maryland home.

She prides herself in being able to unearth interesting vignettes regardless of the landscape she finds herself in. “I like to explore wherever I go,” she says. “Anywhere you go, you can find cool, interesting subject matter in the landscape. To me, it just provides a huge, diverse body of work.”

Another change that has come out of working primarily from her studio is a transition from pastels to oil paint. “I was looking for something a little different and more challenging,” she explains. “I’m having a really fun time exploring how that medium works.” While it doesn’t offer the immediacy of pastel, oil paint affords Will “opportunities for contrast” and the ability to create three-dimensional texture on the canvas. She can also paint on a larger scale, which she has always enjoyed.

Though she takes thousands of photos and makes numerous sketches of her source material, Will works primarily alla prima, starting a painting from scratch and finishing it in one sitting. She finds this approach satisfying, as she prefers to “solve the problem only once.” More than that, Will values the immediacy of working at a faster pace and the robust results it brings. She can combine established technique with instinct to create art that celebrates and preserves her process.

Will’s style has elements of modernism and abstraction that separate it from most traditional landscape painting. While she retains a spatial progression from foreground to background, she likewise reduces the subject down to its most elemental shapes as she limits intricate details. The landscapes are transformed into well-defined sections of colors, lines and patterns of shadow and light that work in concert with one another.

“I like to push color,” says the artist, who, in turn, applies hues boldly, using saturation and contrast to create movement and energy throughout the picture plane. Her compositions are closely cropped and intimate, as if the viewer is in the scene, not merely looking at it.

Will strives to maintain the evidence of the artist’s hand on every surface she works. Her paintings are both grounded in and refined by her emphasis on mark making and visual elements. In fact, she regards these foundational components as having equal importance as the subject matter. “Mark making is like your fingerprint,” she says.

While she offers somewhat abstracted depictions of the landscape, her realism lies in exhibiting the honesty of the artist’s process, the history of putting pigment onto support. The result is an imperfect yet vivacious interpretation of the elements-both natural and artistic-as they coalesce into one intrepid composition. “There’s an honesty to it,” Will says. “I like something about the raw rough­ ness of the stakes of learning, of leaving things unfinished…or letting a viewer participate and fill in their experience.”

Indeed, she wants to imbue her pieces with character, with her unique, unapologetic marks of color and light and line to present a visual narrative of the journey she has taken from intangible inspiration to finished piece. “Each one takes me somewhere and teaches me something,” she says of her paintings.

Will sees the act of painting as simultaneously selfish and selfless. As she finds personal and intellectual fulfillment in her creative pursuits, she can release those feelings in a visual format to spur a dialogue with viewers.

“The actual act of painting is, to me, something I inherently need,” she explains. “It soothes my soul. At the same time, I’m trying to take whatever I find exciting or enticing or something that is worth sharing with the viewer and trying to transfer that energy onto a canvas or a piece of paper and allow them to then absorb it back and enjoy it.”

contact information
www.tarawill.com

representation
Gallery 99, Westminster, MD, www.aintthataframe.com.
Paradigm Gallery at Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN, www.fwmoa.org/paradigm-gallery/