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Arts & Entertainment

Artist Brings Nature, Inspiration to the Canvas

Picone hopes her works evoke emotions.

The breathtaking views from the top of Potter Hill Road provide plenty of inspiration for people from all over the area. Local artist Allison Coelho Picone uses this scenery as subject matter for her paintings, which include landscapes, flowers and portraits.

“The surrounding landscape and the hill where I live has been a great inspiration,” Picone said as she recently sat in her home, which also serves as her studio.

In addition to the natural landscape, Picone uses the local Queen Anne Lace flower as the subject matter of her most recent works. The flower has been the inspiration for Picone's Queen Anne Lace series which she says has taught her to grow as an artist. She says she'll often use photographs of the native flower to motivate her to paint.

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Picone attended U Mass Dartmouth where she studied painting and illustration. After taking time out to raise her two children, Joseph and Angelina, she went back to painting full time.

Her first paintings were portraits of her family which were done with acrylic paint. Several of them adorn the walls of her home, including one depicting her husband sitting on their deck and another of her kids at play.

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Since then, she has been painting natural landscapes and varieties of flowers. Picone said her landscapes are painted with the viewer in mind.

She said she doesn't want to capture a strict representation of the landscape but wants to capture the emotion that she gets from a landscape and to get that emotion on to the canvas.

Picone works mostly from her home studio, but she also paints and sketches outside. Just up the street at the top of Potter Hill Road is an area owned by the Grafton Land Trust where there are walking trails and the view stretches across Worcester County.

Picone also paints from photographs. Once she begins a painting, either from photographs or nature, she transitions from the representation of the scene into using her own imagination and mood to paint.

She said her process involves using sketches on canvas to start the painting and then using layering techniques such as translucent glazes to build the painting up. The “building up” of the layers makes if difficult to know exactly how or when the painting will come out. 

She said she knows the painting is done “when I see it start to pop, and the painting seems to arrive.” 

A few of Picone's favorite artists include “Monet, for his use of classic color, and Van Gogh for his use of lines and color in nature,” she said. 

She also talks passionately about contemporary artists, especially painter Mary Moquin, who recently held an art retreat which she attended. 

“It awakened my sensitivity to nature,” she said. 

With the guidance of Moquin, Picone decided to turn her subject of the Queen Anne Lace flower into a series of paintings.

 For more information and to view Picone's work, visit www.allisonpicone.com.

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