April Waters
April Waters was born in Santa Monica, California in 1954. She moved to UC Boulder for her undergraduate years, then went to UCLA, California State University, and Fullerton. It wasn’t until around 1995 that she and her husband moved to the Pacific Northwest, searching for artistic inspiration in a rich green landscape.
The inspiration for Waters’ realistic and representational landscapes comes from her interest in Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) best known for his water lilies series, and artists like David Hockney (b. 1937)known for his bright color, outdoor settings, and flat painting style.
Waters is best known for her landscapes and their focus on water- a passion of hers since childhood when she made her first painting- a view of Catalina Island from her backyard. A staunch advocate for sustainability, land appreciation, and indigenous water rights, Waters wants to protect water and help others appreciate it through her work. She is particularly interested in the rivers and waterfalls of Oregon, as well as the rain of the Willamette Valley but doesn’t just contain herself to water in Oregon; she has also had artist residencies in Antarctica, Iceland, Greenland. In these places, she allows her style and color palette to change alongside the changing water. The valley is full of earth tones and red, but in Antarctica, it was a deeper varied palette of blues.
Waters loves to challenge herself and allow her style to change as water does, but what is consistent is the monumentality and scale of her works, which usually fill up a wall. This scale of painting is used to impress people with nature, make a statement, and show the time and layers that build up in nature to make it so impressive. She also tends to use canvas stretched over panel as the panel allows her to make bigger compositions, expand, and layer on more paint. Because her canvases are so big, she often doesn’t paint entirely from life or en plein air (to paint a scene outside as it happens) but will make a miniature painting of the scene, a drawing, or take a picture.
To Waters, landscape painting makes people appreciate the land and understand the danger it is currently in as climate change ravages the world. However, it also is a way to gift people beauty and comfort. As a former nurse, Waters saw firsthand how seeing beautiful and familiar landscapes comforts those in some sort of pain, and thus her landscapes, in their grandeur, luminosity, and familiar beauty, also serve as a visual pain reliever and thing of beauty.