Tarrytown, the home of painter Camie Salaz, lies about 20 miles north of New York on the Hudson River, where the great landscape painters Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Sanford Robinson Gifford worked, as did famous philosophers Emerson and Thoreau.
“I knew I wanted to be a professional artist from an early age,” Salaz said. She enrolled at Cornish College of the Arts but during the last two years of her study, a nationwide change in curriculum put an end to recognizing life drawing and painting as a core part of an artists training. It took its toll.
“After college, I felt a little lost for a while. My technical ability wasn’t quite what I wanted, and I didn’t feel I was part of an artists’ community.”
Salaz moved to New York to study at Jacob Collins’s Water Street Atelier. “I'll never forget what it was like walking in there, seeing all the students so focused and intent, at all hours of the day. It felt like coming home.”
Yet art is more than technique alone, and Salaz shares her admiration for the masters who knew how to imbue life to the figures they painted.
She vividly remembers taking a trip to the New York Metropolitan museum at age 19 and seeing Jules Bastien-Lepage’s “Joan of Arc” in life for the first time.
“Like many people who have seen this painting, I was stopped in my tracks. I felt not that I was staring at a painting, but staring at a living, breathing human being that had all of the strength, courage, wonder, and passion I aspired toward. It changed my life.”
