A REALIST style of painting is what artist of 30 years Pamela Moore enjoys these days, but her versatility around the style is vast.
Pamela works in oil, watercolor, pastels as well as many drawing mediums and began classes at her Glen Creek Road studio in Bonnie Doon about two years ago.
Over her extensive artistic career she has studied oil painting with Ron Crawford, Alan Marin, Max Wilks and Lee Machelak, and watercolor with Margaret Cowling and David Taylor.
Along with Pamela's watercolor and drawing classes she mixes with a group of eight local artists who do life drawing every week.
The non-tutored group of artists paint live models and there are facilities for artists in Melbourne to stay at the self-contained studio accommodation. "This isgreat and we bounce ideas off each other because you need other artists to talk to," she said.
The studio was built with windows on the south of the building to create a good environment for tonal painting.
"The southern light is more constant which is needed for oil painting," she said. "If I don't have that constant light it would be dark one minute and light the next and I can't paint like that with oil paints, although you need good light for watercolor."
Pamela favors still life painting in which she learnt the technique of tonal painting. She recently learnt portrait with Lee Machelak and also learnt landscape with Max Wilks.
"I've covered a lot of bases and I was learning still life in oil tonal painting and I thought it wasn't giving me enough scope with landscape," she said. "It's a little bit romantic and you need the atmosphere with landscape, so I thought I would do some watercolor with David Taylor
which will loosen me up for oil landscapes, but I got hooked on watercolor."I view David Taylor as the best in landscape. Then I found that Margaret Cowling did lovely portraits in watercolor so I moved in with her and learnt that, along with still life in watercolor."
Pamela teaches still life from watercolor using photographs, a technique she picked up from David Taylor."I also work in pastel and this has the same principles as working in oil," she said. "In watercolor you generally start with your darks and in oil you start with your lights."It depends on the subject which medium I choose."
Pamela painted with Ron Crawford for 10 years one day a week at the beginning of her artistic journey and she views John Sargent as her favorite artist today. She has won dozens of awards over the years and has a wealth of knowledge gained from some of the best Australian artists.