About Me
I am a wife to a wonderful husband and mother to two great kids. We live in beautiful Pawlet, Vermont.
I studied architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, MA graduating cum laude, third in my class. I worked as an architect for Bill Badger & Associates in Manchester, VT until I had my daughter, Ashley. I then started my own firm, Pratt Design so I could stay home with her. While I worked from home I became a Stampin' Up Demonstrator and started a website, Stamp-n-Design, where I sell tutorials for scrapbooking and card making projects.
During college I took many different kinds of art classes, one of them being a watercolor painting class. Now that my kids have gotten a little older, I decided to take it up again, and started painting! I have taken classes with other talented Vermont artists and continue to work and improve my craft.
I hope you enjoy my work as much as I enjoy painting it!
I studied architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, MA graduating cum laude, third in my class. I worked as an architect for Bill Badger & Associates in Manchester, VT until I had my daughter, Ashley. I then started my own firm, Pratt Design so I could stay home with her. While I worked from home I became a Stampin' Up Demonstrator and started a website, Stamp-n-Design, where I sell tutorials for scrapbooking and card making projects.
During college I took many different kinds of art classes, one of them being a watercolor painting class. Now that my kids have gotten a little older, I decided to take it up again, and started painting! I have taken classes with other talented Vermont artists and continue to work and improve my craft.
I hope you enjoy my work as much as I enjoy painting it!
About my Work
As long as I can remember I have always been a perfectionist when it comes to art. It doesn’t matter if it’s a one minute sketch or a forty hour painting, I like things to look just so. The training I had as an architect fits perfectly into this. When you draw stairs in an architectural drawing, they have to be exact, or once they are built, they will not get you to the next floor. In the same way, every detail of my paintings have to be realistic and authentic, or the entire watercolor does not work.
In my paintings, I enjoy focusing on certain details and highlighting them, instead of focusing on the entire scene. The hinge of a door, the peak of a roof, a single window of a house. I believe when you take one element out of the whole, it gives you an entirely different feeling. Many small features all come together to make what a person would normally envision when they think of a barn, let’s say. But when you only focus on the hinge of the barn door and a few boards, it puts that small piece in an entirely different light. You notice how the sun hits that one object and the shadows it forms; the roughness and grain of the wood and the character and texture of the rust on the metal. That one piece seems to become the most important element, and you begin to notice how unique it is and the feelings that it evokes. You notice things about it that you would never become aware of if it was painted as part of the whole. There is so much more character in those small elements that helps to make my paintings… my art.
In my paintings, I enjoy focusing on certain details and highlighting them, instead of focusing on the entire scene. The hinge of a door, the peak of a roof, a single window of a house. I believe when you take one element out of the whole, it gives you an entirely different feeling. Many small features all come together to make what a person would normally envision when they think of a barn, let’s say. But when you only focus on the hinge of the barn door and a few boards, it puts that small piece in an entirely different light. You notice how the sun hits that one object and the shadows it forms; the roughness and grain of the wood and the character and texture of the rust on the metal. That one piece seems to become the most important element, and you begin to notice how unique it is and the feelings that it evokes. You notice things about it that you would never become aware of if it was painted as part of the whole. There is so much more character in those small elements that helps to make my paintings… my art.
