Sheri Farabaugh | Compelling Reflections

By Norman Kolpas

This story was featured in the May 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art May 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

The languid reflections of lotus leaves on a tranquil pond. The gentle eddying of a lazy creek as it laps around the ankles of a man and his young grandson, holding hands as they test the waters together. The exuberant splashes of a rushing stream breaking against rocks that jut from its shallow bed. Water, in its many natural forms, holds particular fascination for Sheri Farabaugh, and she observes and captures it with sublime sensitivity and immediacy, producing paintings that are sometimes realistic, sometimes closer to impressionism, but always engagingly composed and impeccably rendered.

Her sureness of vision and masterful execution have won the artist—who splits her time between the greater Denver area and a Phoenix suburb—recognition in abundance, including Fellowship status with the American Society of Marine Artists, Signature Membership in Oil Painters of America, an Artists’ Choice Award at last year’s Cowgirl Up! show and sale, and an Award of Excellence from American Women Artists.

Considering such successes, it may come as a surprise to learn that Farabaugh has been pursuing painting seriously for barely more than a dozen years, after almost three decades of successful careers in fields not associated with fine art: biochemistry, brewing, tax accounting, and bookkeeping. “Those were jobs that I did because you need to work to support yourself,” she says, thinking back on her previous endeavors. “And painting is something I do simply because I absolutely love doing it.”

Before Farabaugh was ever introduced to art as a child, water was central to some of her happiest memories growing up in Jefferson, WI, midway between Milwaukee and Madison. “My grandpa built a cottage for the family on Wind Lake,” she says of “an old fishermen’s lake” about 40 miles east of her hometown. “I spent a lot of time as a kid on the water there, rowing and fishing and skiing and swimming and just horsing around.”

Contrasted with those vivid recollections, her earliest recollections of art activities are “vague,” she says—“although I’m sure my mom enrolled me in summer art programs, and I always enjoyed art.” Not until high school, though, did art instruction make any distinct impression on her: “I had Vince Lia for art classes all three years at Jefferson Senior High, and he was a very encouraging teacher and a very good realist artist.” Occasionally, Mr. Lia would bring in one of his own paintings to show the class, and Farabaugh especially remembers his life-size portrait of a seated woman. “Her skin was just like porcelain, and it was amazing to me that my teacher could render skin so beautifully,” she recalls. One day, in response to one of her own in-class efforts, the teacher told her that he thought she could go on to study art in college. “But I didn’t know anyone who made their living at art, and I didn’t see it as an option,” she notes.

Instead, the young woman pursued another talent that came naturally to her as the daughter of a chemist for a local company that provided malt to breweries. She entered the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus and graduated in 1976 with a degree in biochemistry. “It was easy to gravitate to something you know and see every day,” she says. Straight from there, she landed a job working in quality control at the Miller Brewery in Milwaukee, where she stayed for two years. She followed that stint with a three-month backpacking trip across Europe, which did include a few artistic stops along the way. “I’m sure I hit the Louvre and a couple of museums in Florence,” she laughs.

Back in the States, she moved to Denver “for the skiing and a job working in the research and development department at Coors.” While she enjoyed her six years there, she gradually began to think, “It would be nice to be self-employed. And I’m good with numbers, so accounting sounded like a good idea.” Going to Metropolitan State College (now Metropolitan State University of Denver) during the day while working the swing shift at Coors, she earned enough credits to sit for the CPA exam, and eventually she left the brewery to work as a tax accountant at various CPA firms for several years before setting out independently as a bookkeeper for her own clients.

Her life path at the time felt settled and secure, especially after she met and, in 1991, married Dave Farabaugh, co-owner of a Denver-area business that made Fiberglas lighting poles. But soon after they wed, a friend gave her a gift certificate to take a class at the Art Students League of Denver, and her workshop there with respected impressionist Mark Daily both thrilled and unsettled her. “It was so incredibly exciting that I could barely sleep. Mark was encouraging, too. He told me I could draw but I didn’t know anything about color, and he encouraged me to do some color charts. And I thought art was fabulous, and I loved doing it, but I just didn’t have the time.”

Time opened up after Dave sold his business in 2005 and he and Sheri became “snowbirds in Arizona,” spending warmer months in their Colorado home and colder seasons in the Valley of the Sun. That December, she signed up for a beginning watercolor class held at the art club in the Arizona community where they lived. “I did a funky little painting of a flower,” she says. “They hung it on the wall, and that little bit of recognition was all it took. I was absolutely hooked.” She followed up with classes in oil painting, encaustic, acrylics—“a little bit of everything.”

Back in Denver the following spring, she returned to the Art Students League and began studies in earnest, taking classes not only with Daily but also with other painters of note including Doug Dawson, Kim English, Kevin Weckbach, Michelle Torrez, and Jane Jones. Meanwhile, she found still more inspiration by studying the works of great painters like Andrew Wyeth and Joaquín Sorolla. “I wanted to learn as much as I could,” says Farabaugh.

She progressed quickly. While still studying at the Art Students League, she and her fellow students were challenged by an instructor to “find something to paint on the Platte River in downtown Denver.” She trained her camera—which she uses for reference, along with value and color sketches—on a little falls in the waterway. “I ended up painting that, and it sold,” she says. “Then I went on to do a series of probably 15 paintings of those falls.” She entered one of them in an exhibition back in Arizona, and it was selected as Best of Show and sold for a price in the thousands. “That set me back on my heels so much that I stopped painting for a couple of weeks,” she says. But she did continue, and the succession of local and national accolades, awards, and memberships—not to mention gallery representation—continued to grow impressively.

Today, Farabaugh is a full-time professional painter, working both at a home studio in her winter residence in Gold Canyon, AZ, and in a studio she keeps in an arts complex called Main Street Creatives in Brighton, CO, 12 miles from the couple’s warmer-season home in the Denver suburb of Thornton. She may be working on as many as a dozen different paintings at once, in varying stages of progress. The initial step is a 2-inch grid she draws in light-blue oil to help her “get the drawing precise,” working on boards she first sands and gessoes multiple times. After that come the layers and layers of oil paints she lays in, from broader backgrounds to finer details, as she painstakingly fine-tunes her compositions and colors to achieve her luminous—and aqueous—effects.

Take, for example, LOTUS LEAVES AND LILY PADS, a work included in an upcoming American Women Artists show at the Steamboat Art Museum. Farabaugh estimates the painting’s darker areas may have required three to five layers of translucent colors like sap green and ultramarine blue to bring to life the “abstract patterns of the leaves and their reflections on the water.” The result of those efforts, she observes, “is so restful to look at. That’s one of the reasons I paint water so often.”

She quickly adds, however, that water isn’t the only thing she portrays. “My subject matter, and my style, are all over the board. I just look for good light and good composition, and some subjects need to be rendered more tightly while some are lovely a little bit looser.” For evidence of this diversity, look to her ELEVEN GARLIC SCAPES, a still life that resulted from a farmers’ market purchase that she simply “threw down on some black construction paper,” going on to capture the random tangle of fresh allium shoots with such verisimilitude that it won the Creative Achievement Award from the International Guild of Realism in January 2017.

Such range attests to a self-assurance that Farabaugh has gained through dedicated hard work—combined, of course, with her innate yet long-latent talent. Although it took decades for her artistic abilities to emerge, she wouldn’t have had it any other way. “I think this happened at a perfect time in my life,” she says. “I’m finally doing what I really, really want to do.”

representationArts at Denver, Denver, CO; Mary Williams Fine Arts, Boulder, CO; Main Street Creatives, Brighton, CO; www.sherifarabaugh.com.

This story was featured in the May 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art May 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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