By Sue Bergstrom for Valdez City News –
Faith Revell is the Curator of Education and Public Programs at the Valdez Museum and Historical Archives and a UAA adjunct professor who teaches fine arts at Prince William Sound Community College. She says she loves to make things by hand and experiment with a variety of media and methods including photography, painting in oil and acrylic on canvas and paper and drawing in charcoal and pen and ink.
“I have long been curious about the world and sentient beings. In late 2011 I moved to Valdez, Alaska, ready for a great adventure and new experiences that would land me in the middle of a grand and terrifying landscape. And connect me to nature and all its elements–in a way that previously I had only imagined, read about in books or saw pictured in film. In the past three years I have hiked the woods, walked the water’s edge, sat for hours watching the light change on mountains, danced in a sea of snow and observed the movement of birds. Using camera, paint, pencil and more I have captured some part of the magic of my experience and then shared it with others.”
An exhibit of Faith’s work entitled Bird Dance is currently being shown at the Pratt Museum in Homer. The exhibit is described as images paired with selected artifacts from the Pratt Museum’s natural history collection, as well as video and audio of birds in motion. On May 30 she will be presenting a workshop at the Pratt entitled, Gesture and Form in Nature. This workshop, geared toward adult and young adult artists, will start with an outdoor field session as well as drawing of mounted birds inside the museum and then a move to a workshop space to complete projects.
Faith’s interest in art began when she became fascinated with the flourishes her third-grade teacher added to her script and took up calligraphy. The flowing, graceful movement of beautiful script is echoed in another of her loves, birds, which she says embody the freedom of moving unencumbered in the same way that dance does. Photographing, painting and sketching birds is one way she expresses that love. Faith gained her appreciation of dance, music and art from her parents. Her mother was an accomplished ballroom dancer and her father a talented wood-carver who loved to sing. She graduated Maryland Institute of Art with a Master of Fine Arts in painting and exhibited widely on the East Coast and in the Midwest prior to moving to Alaska. Her work can be found in numerous private collections. She has also been a professional exhibit designer and installation artist, photographer and writer.
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See more of Faith’s artwork below.
Common Murre – charcoal on paper
