Landscape artists are divided into many different factions. These lines can be drawn by media—are you a watercolor painter, oils, or acrylics? Some painters are divided between studio artists and plein air painters, the latter of which paint their scenes on the spot. Then there are the photographers, those who scout the perfect scenes and time of day to capture the splendor of rolling hills blanketed in clouds, all wreathed in spectacles of light.
And then there are artists like Patricia Stalter, who have managed to straddle the line, taking digital photographs and transforming them with image editing software. Sometimes, Stalter explained, she gets some playful guff from the painters, which she completely understands.
“I don’t envy artists that paint with oils, acrylics, or watercolors,” Stalter said. “When I’m done, I just have to turn off my computer, I don’t have to clean it all up.
“I hear it all the time, that all I do is push buttons,” she added. “But if I were an artist coming up right now, I would be striving to learn this software.”
Stalter isn’t just skilled with a digital camera but has built up some skills with Photoshop and Corel Painter, which allow her to digitally manipulate the images she captures on the computer or a tablet, creating digital paintings of local landscapes and subjects.
A small selection of Stalter’s landscape work currently shows at the Los Olivos Café, where the Santa Ynez Valley Arts—of which she’s a member—regularly shows work by its members. She didn’t take photography seriously until a vacation trip to Europe in 2001, Stalter explained, when she was told she “had the eye” for framing scenery and subjects.
Without any formal training, she began attending expos, conferences, and workshops, where her interest in not just digital photography but digital image editing peaked as well. She’s also tapped into a number of online resources to help diversify the technological palette at her fingertips.
“With Corel Painter, you use the actual photo as a canvas, or pad if you will, and you use the program to choose different brushes,” she said. “You can go in there, and if you want it to look more like a watercolor, well there’s that kind of brush, but there are literally hundreds of brushes, and you can make your own with all the different settings.”
The end result of Stalter’s work is a stylized, yet photorealistic image. The show at Los Olivos Café is titled Splendors of the Central Coast, and features landscapes from throughout the area, from vineyards to rolling hills, from farmland to historic sites. She also enjoys street photography, going to car shows with her husband, and animal portraits.
Though she may not have paints and brushes to clean up, Stalter said, she still spends plenty of time working with her computer and an external hard drive, managing gigabytes’ worth of images. The digital realm does have its perks though, she said, because she gets to choose nontraditional ways to show her work.
Stalter often prints her pieces on canvas to really bring the painting feel home, but she also prints on paper, which she frames. But lately, she said, she’s been really enjoying printing her images on aluminum metal sheets. A few examples of these pieces are hanging at the Valley Arts Gallery in Orcutt, where Stalter is also a member, and those pieces don’t even need frames, she said.
“It depends on the character of the piece, where you want to put it, like canvas or paper or metal,” she said. “I’m getting more away from the frames, they get banged up and beat up, and they’re hard to carry around and manage.
“I know you’re not supposed to say that,” she laughed, “but that’s just where I’ve been going. I guess I’m supposed to call it work, but it is a whole lot of fun.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne doesn’t know what artists are ‘supposed’ to say. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 21-28, 2016.