The Spontaneous Landscape
in Oil and Pastel
Artist Statement
I love the fresh spontaneity of working with pastels to capture my immediate impressions of my subjects. My oil paintings allow me an expressive exploration of my subjects through rich colors and textures.
I am compelled to paint outdoors where I am exposed to all sorts of conditions -- the fierceness or the flatness of the land, the impulsiveness of the fleeting light, the moodiness of the clouds, the sometimes whispering and sometimes howling wind, the ever-changing and never-quite-right temperatures, and even the critters, some creepy and others, cute. All of the forces of Nature brings inspiration to me and a sense of life into my paintings.
It is 'wonder' that I want to explore in my paintings. Through my observation, I want you to experience the awe I feel out in Nature. I want for you to see not so much the replication or visual reality of the landscape as we all see it, but for you to know in a single gaze the magnificent and the mysterious spirit of the natural world that compels me to paint. Through my paintings, I want you to recognize the simultaneous levels of reality that surround us in Nature. To describe my experience, I use my unique color sensibility to move my paint with defined articulation and sensuous strokes. My understanding of how the interaction of color creates the impression of light and how values and movement can evoke a certain mood gives my work expressive breadth.
As I continue to develop my own voice, I realize that the question is what interests me, and not the answer. The answer, I know, is ultimately "beauty." But what I want to find is the unseen beauty. On many levels. How can I express it? How can I make you see it too? I want my paintings to cultivate, enthrall and empower. I strive to celebrate the mystery of beauty, or perhaps, the beauty of mystery.
I thrive on the challenges and satisfactions of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and expressing it through my paintings. My hallmark has always been an emphasis on spontaneity, expression and intuitive creativity. My touch is direct and personal, skilled and intimate -- expressing endless exploration of beauty and nature with a wide range of techniques. I respond to what I see with a sense of wonder that keeps my work inspired, timeless and always fresh.
About the Artist
Known for her powerful and intense color work, Pernie Fallon’s impressionistic pastel paintings of fierce landscapes are vivid and painterly. But on closer examination, there are qualities that are not so obvious on the surface. Fallon’s paintings transcend the beauty of place with unexpected emotion, movement, and life.
Fallon believes that the greatest influences on her work were the circumstances of her upbringing in a small town on the Texas Plains: “My life has influenced me to look deep and hard to find the hidden beauty and spirituality in places most people might find uninviting and empty. From an early age, I knew I was an artist and saw things in a different light.”
Born in the Texas Panhandle oil town of Pampa, Fallon is the oldest of three children. Growing up in the passive solar mid-century modern house that her parents built from a recycled wooden oil derrick, bricks from a demolished bank, pavers from a brick street being re-paved with asphalt, and even cypress wood panels from Louisiana trees being cleared for construction, she developed a strong sense of design and understood the importance of using quality materials at an early age. She credits her father, a petroleum engineer with whom she spent countless hours rock hunting and looking for arrowheads while he was on a well, for teaching her how to problem solve innovatively. Her mother taught her to be creative and to appreciate beauty in humanity as well as the fine arts.
Her art became her profession by the age of 14, when she learned to make jewelry. Her first ring won a national award, thus launching her career as a jewelry designer. Later at Arizona State University, she studied under David Pimentel and received a BFA in metalsmithing and jewelry design. After college, she kept abreast of new techniques and fresh ideas by continuing her education with top designers in the field. She built her business, Pernie Fallon Jewelry, designing for over 30 years one-of-a-kind gold jewelry for private collectors worldwide. Galleries in Santa Fe and Taos have represented her jewelry and her work has been part of the Smithsonian Arttrain exhibition.
Later, an artist friend, Amy Winton, put a pastel into Fallon’s hand and she was smitten. Enamored with the new medium that could be worked with as intimately as metal, she began to explore pastel and her paintings started winning awards. She moved to Boulder and continued her training at the Denver Arts Students League. In recent years, Fallon has returned to her native Texas to teach art in the Dallas area schools. She currently teaches the AP and advanced art classes at Liberty High School in Frisco. Outside of school, she continues to paint daily in her studio or where she really loves to be, outside on location when weather permits. During the summer, she makes annual trips to her favorite locations in Texas, New Mexico and Colorado and occasionally Mexico or Central America, to paint en plein air and photograph, gathering reference material for future studio paintings.
Being from the Texas Panhandle might seem a far cry from being exposed to the arts, but the area was rich in art and culture. The tiny, but enormously beautiful pastel paintings by Frank Reaugh of cattle and the West Texas landscape at Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum further fueled her desire for painting in pure pigment. It was while she was earning her masters degree from the University of North Texas, that she became interested in the legacy of early Texas artist Frank Reaugh. It has become her pasttime to retrace his steps – his sketch trips, to stand in the exact spot and paint the pastoral vistas he so beautifully captured.
Connecting with with Reaugh’s last living student, then 93-year-old Lucretia Donnell Coke, she learned exactly how Reaugh taught pastel painting to his students. Fallon considers herself to be a third generation student of Reaugh, a descendent of his even though he had no children. She passes on the legacy, teaching her young students the way Reaugh taught the then young Lucretia.
Most recently, Fallon has added oil painting to her repertoire. Painting from life, she has a fondness for capturing the mood and the moment in time of her models or her surroundings. Her love of the outdoors is evident in her plein air landscape paintings which are lively with dancing strokes as she quickly paints the ever-changing light.
Fallon’s work is collected across the country. She exhibits yearly at The Cove and The Martin Place in McKinney She participates in national juried shows as well as local art events, mainly the McKinney Art Studio Tour, Unique by Nature and Arts in Bloom.
