Wendy Caldwell Maloney (American, 1957- ) is a native Buffalonian whose training began with a broad foundation of studio art and ceramics at The Park School of Buffalo and continued at Alfred University where she earned her BFA in Art & Design with concentrations in drawing, printmaking and photography.
She returned to Buffalo in 1979 and began a career in the pre-press industry working as a typographer and graphic artist. In 1991, she began her own graphic design and illustration business, Current Design. As a sole proprietor, she served the Western New York business community for two decades in a wide variety of roles, from concept and design, to typesetting, illustration, copywriting, and print brokering.
By 2002, a yearning to return to the fine arts led Wendy to study watercolor with renowned Buffalo artist Margaret M. Martin. She took to the medium instantly, finding it endlessly versatile and challenging and within a year was showing and selling her work in Western New York and New England with considerable success. Inspired most often by the rich textures, vibrant colors, and exciting line qualities of the natural world, her work ranges from organic and botanical images to the rugged features of the eastern seacoast. Abstract works are often inspired by her innate love of color and her instinctive response to music and dance.
Wendy has exhibited in a wide variety of solo, two-person, and group shows. Venues include: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Kenan Center, Western New York Artist’s Group Gallery, Buffalo Big Print Gallery, Fox Run’s Gyda Higgins Gallery, Hallwalls, The Jewish Community Center, Hospice Buffalo, The Buffalo History Museum, The Saturn Club, and The Birge Mansion, as well as the Buffalo Decorator’s Show House. She is included in the Collections of Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Oishei Children’s Hospital, Harmac Medical Products (Mexico) and the Gerald Mead Collection. She is an exhibiting member of the Buffalo Society of Artists, a signature member of the Niagara Frontier Watercolor Society, has taught workshops at The Burchfield Penney Art Center, and works from her home studio in Snyder, NY.
Artist Statement:
“I am primarily a watercolorist; it is the immediacy and the versatility of the medium that appeal to me. Sweeping washes, bold brushstrokes, and exacting detail can all be executed without the interruption of prolonged drying time. Excited by line, texture, and detail in the natural world, I am drawn to imagery that has presence: subtle or brilliant color, a sense of power or calm, elegant simplicity or stunning complexity.
As a former graphic designer, my challenge was to grab the attention of my viewers and hold it long enough for a message to be communicated — elegantly, powerfully, immediately. I use the same approach in choosing subject matter to paint.
A digital camera enables me to isolate areas of interest from scenes of visual overwhelm and to zoom-in to capture and expose details in nature that are often overlooked. While awed by the near-perfect symmetry of a thousand-petaled flower, I am equally excited by the visual impact of a fractured tree limb or the riot of color in decaying foliage.
My work is experiential; as I paint, I become the surging wave, the intricate surfaces of beach stones, the saturated reds of autumn. There is a physical and emotional response toward a particular subject and as I observe and render it, the child in me wants to take you by the hand and say, ‘Come with me, I have to show you something!’
My love for nature was formed during childhood summers on Lake Erie and in the Canadian woods and summers in a rustic camp setting in the Adirondacks. Numerous painting trips to the Eastern seaboard heightened my interest in the textures and surfaces of stones and surf. Cracks, crevices, and geologic shifts describe handsome graphics along the Atlantic coastline, and calligraphy emerges in the frenzied and liquid lines of the ocean’s tides and, closer to home, in the raging current of the Niagara River. Quiet time to explore and observe is crucial to my work.
While my representational work is inspired primarily by what I see, my abstract work is additionally informed by what I hear and feel. When painting abstract pieces, music becomes my partner. My brushstrokes speak to the visceral sensation of motion and rhythm I feel as an athlete and a dancer, and the structural integrity of music is explored through the repetition of shapes on the page.”
Why Do I Paint?
So why do I paint? Why don’t I just take photographs? I do, in fact, take photographs, I take them by the dozens, by the hundreds, and I take them for lots of different reasons; I take them because something I see is so profoundly beautiful, I want to save it, to savor it, to remember more of it than my eye can possibly take in, in the moment. I also use the camera to be selective: when there is so much to look at, so many details to remember, my mind’s eye needs to reduce the playing field – it needs to zoom in, get close to what speaks to me. It could be the magnificent detail in the center of a flower where each tiny, tubular curl of a petal stands upright, waiting to unfold and unfurl in the sun. It could be the crusty surface of an old tree where the craggy gray bark hugs the trunk or curls away from it in bizarre, animated shapes. Or it could be the way sunlight dances off of water and creates liquid geometric designs on the curved underbelly of a sailboat. Or maybe it’s the rich, detailed stripes on a stone by the sea capturing thousands of years of the earth’s compression, then smoothed and rounded by the eternal tumble of sand and waves.
So why do I paint? Because it is in this process of seeing… of painting… of paying close attention to my world… that my own sense of wonder expands, my appreciation deepens, and in the sharing, my joy is multiplied.
Artist's Website: wendycaldwellmaloney.com
Instagram: @wendycaldwellmaloneyart
facebook: wendy.caldwellmaloney
(Source: The artist's website)
