About Me:

I grew up in the farmlands of northern Indiana, a distance west of Geneva, on the north edge of the Loblolly swamp. As a child I was especially fond of the woods and spent hours there, among the fauna and wildlife.

I worked hard, tending livestock and working in the fields on my family’s farm. My farm labor included cutting firewood, building fences, painting barns, and helping put in tile ditch.

My grandmother’s influence taught me a great love of beautiful things, and I took an interest in art while still a child. I spent endless hours absorbing the rural Indiana landscape and painted everything I could. As an adult, I studied art in university while also earning a degree in business communications. I also studied art in Rome for some time.

My art is primarily representational with an oeuvre ranging from pure landscape to narrative realism. Recording the historical, reflecting on life, and witnessing the beauty of nature.

Imagery is vital to my approach to painting. My inspiration comes from many places. I am, at times, inspired by music on the radio, a phrase someone speaks to me, or something I read in the newspaper; from literature, the human figure, the masters work, travel, and the forces of nature. 

Much of the art of the past century has been a reaction to the ugliness and dehumanization of life in the modern world, with its mass media culture, mechanized industrialization that removes the human element from the creation of the things that we use in everyday life, and the brutality of modern genocidal war. I see the world in different terms. I believe in the beauty of the natural world and the human experience of the common person. I find merit to those who celebrate life and the beauty within it. I attempt to give a new view, an introduction to something simple they were unawares in their own everyday world.

My art represents a lifetime of journeys, studies, and experiences; and it is included in many private and corporate collections across the United States.

 I hope for those who purchase my art to be able to cherish it for the beauty they find in it, and pass it and the humanist outlook that it embodies to a future generation.

©2023 Gedda Runyon Starlin