A N D R E S P Ä Ä B O
w w w . p a a b o . c a
My Path to Becoming an Aritst
1957 - I am in foreground during winter family trip to the cottage. By bag contains art supplies for sketching or painting during our stay
I have now tried
to make a living from being a realist nature artist
with plenty of scientific curiosity on the side, for 20-30 years.
Before
that I had been studying science (applied science and engineering at
the University of Toronto). Although my general scientific curiosity
kept me in university until graduation, once I became employed as an
engineer or planner, I found the path to further discovery, to further
satisfying my curiosity, was closed.
I found myself returning mentally to my early days of explorations of nature and portraiture. By the time I was a teenager, I had sketched and painted many portraits and landscapes, and spent several years participating in special young people's art courses held once a week at the Art Gallery of Ontario and then at the Ontario College of Art. But mostly I was self-taught with the help of books from the library and direct experience painting the wilderness at the family cottage in east central Canada.
But then the original teenage pursuit of art ( depicted in the above photo) subsided since the pursuit of art is never secure and I headed toward engineering, planning. Nonetheless I saw an opportunity to bring back my teenager circumstances and pursuits at least as a pastime. But by the end o the 1970's, one saw North American public's interest towards the natural world explode thought the images in the limited edition prints of environmental wildlife art of Robert Bateman. Then there was a recession at that time and the consulting firm where I was working closed down, It was a time to reevaluate my life. I decided that instead of searching for another job in which I found little joy, I would return to my aspirations when I was a teenager painting landscapes and people at the family summer cottage in central Ontario south of Algonquin Park. With parents deceased by now, I inherited half a cottage and bought out the other half from my sister. I was now exactly in the position I had been over a decade ago and being inspired to paint and sell paintings of the wilderness. The cottage property was now mine. and I was free to decide to live there, make my studio there, and make that my home base as I pursued art.
I of course began painting the kinds of paintings that were now popular, and aspiring to create the masterpiece that could be published as a limited edition litho print.
At the same time, I did everything an artist must in order to recieve attention, find customers, and get an income. I did all the contacting of framing shops and village art galleries. I entered as many annual art festivals I could. Based at my cottage beside the wilderness, I still had a road to a highway and a highway to a local village and Peterborough further away, I had the ideal situation for pursuing wildlife art. I used the phone alot, made the required contacts, attended art festivals from as far west as Thunder Bay and as far east as Ottawa.
I worked hard, and managed to survive as a wildlife artist for a decade and then another decade and another, and I am still here, even as the explosion in interest in wildlife art has subsided already for more than a decade.
I remained with nature art because I understood how it had been before the explosion of interest in the 1980's. Things had simply returned to how they had been before. Indeed, when I began pursuing art as a teemager. there was no explosion in wildlife art, there was what was called "animal art" established mainly in the U.S. and there was also "landscape painting" that took inspiration from the famous Group of Seven and their friend who perished in a canoe accident earlier, I was already doing attractive wildferness landscape art in the late 1950's through the 1960's.
I was therefore not affected by the downturn. I was familiar with the art world of earlier. and I could return to what I did then. In practice that meant mainly generating small landscape painting and placing them in art galleries. One year that was almost all I did and sold!
Since then I have managed to survive on art and continue to have my home base at the same cottage where my artistic pursuits began.
The purpose of these web pages is to show you some examples of what I consider my best work to date. I have divided the presentations between my nature landscapes, my decade or two of wildlife art - nature including animals - and other forms of realist painting including portraits.
Back in the 1960's interest in
landscape paintings was purely about something small to hang on the
wall. Landscape paintings were inspired by impressionistic styles of
Group of Seven/Tom Thomson traditions. As long as one did not
depart too far from realism. I believe in this painting above, painted
on the spot of a marina. It included experimenting
with a new paint - acrylicsI found myself returning mentally to my early days of explorations of nature and portraiture. By the time I was a teenager, I had sketched and painted many portraits and landscapes, and spent several years participating in special young people's art courses held once a week at the Art Gallery of Ontario and then at the Ontario College of Art. But mostly I was self-taught with the help of books from the library and direct experience painting the wilderness at the family cottage in east central Canada.
But then the original teenage pursuit of art ( depicted in the above photo) subsided since the pursuit of art is never secure and I headed toward engineering, planning. Nonetheless I saw an opportunity to bring back my teenager circumstances and pursuits at least as a pastime. But by the end o the 1970's, one saw North American public's interest towards the natural world explode thought the images in the limited edition prints of environmental wildlife art of Robert Bateman. Then there was a recession at that time and the consulting firm where I was working closed down, It was a time to reevaluate my life. I decided that instead of searching for another job in which I found little joy, I would return to my aspirations when I was a teenager painting landscapes and people at the family summer cottage in central Ontario south of Algonquin Park. With parents deceased by now, I inherited half a cottage and bought out the other half from my sister. I was now exactly in the position I had been over a decade ago and being inspired to paint and sell paintings of the wilderness. The cottage property was now mine. and I was free to decide to live there, make my studio there, and make that my home base as I pursued art.
I of course began painting the kinds of paintings that were now popular, and aspiring to create the masterpiece that could be published as a limited edition litho print.
At the same time, I did everything an artist must in order to recieve attention, find customers, and get an income. I did all the contacting of framing shops and village art galleries. I entered as many annual art festivals I could. Based at my cottage beside the wilderness, I still had a road to a highway and a highway to a local village and Peterborough further away, I had the ideal situation for pursuing wildlife art. I used the phone alot, made the required contacts, attended art festivals from as far west as Thunder Bay and as far east as Ottawa.
I worked hard, and managed to survive as a wildlife artist for a decade and then another decade and another, and I am still here, even as the explosion in interest in wildlife art has subsided already for more than a decade.
I remained with nature art because I understood how it had been before the explosion of interest in the 1980's. Things had simply returned to how they had been before. Indeed, when I began pursuing art as a teemager. there was no explosion in wildlife art, there was what was called "animal art" established mainly in the U.S. and there was also "landscape painting" that took inspiration from the famous Group of Seven and their friend who perished in a canoe accident earlier, I was already doing attractive wildferness landscape art in the late 1950's through the 1960's.
I was therefore not affected by the downturn. I was familiar with the art world of earlier. and I could return to what I did then. In practice that meant mainly generating small landscape painting and placing them in art galleries. One year that was almost all I did and sold!
Since then I have managed to survive on art and continue to have my home base at the same cottage where my artistic pursuits began.
The purpose of these web pages is to show you some examples of what I consider my best work to date. I have divided the presentations between my nature landscapes, my decade or two of wildlife art - nature including animals - and other forms of realist painting including portraits.
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LAST UPDATE MAR. 2021 (c) A.Paabo