CREATIVE Expression

Tula Telfair has a studio in Old Lyme, Connecticut, home to what the Hartford Courant called in 1907, “the most talked about art colony in America today.”

- JOHN O’HERN

In the center of it all was Florence Griswold’s boarding house where artists stayed and painted—on canvas and on the walls and paneling of her home.

Telfair began painting landscapes photorealistically, later gravitating into imagined landscapes fueled by her experiences of landscapes around the world. She hopes to “trigger an experience in the viewer that is personal.” Her large canvases, viewed from across the room, convey a familiar but non-specific scene that dissolves into painted brush strokes up close that create another experience. In a recent interview with her dealer Jerald Melberg she said, “I try to create an illusion because that’s the fun part of painting…I like the alchemy and the magic of being able to fool other people by having them believe that they’re looking at something that even I looked at but maybe I didn’t look at. If you believe, then the magic trick is successful.”

In the magical sea of green in her painting The Question of Ownership, moist leaves reflect the light in a composition with a distinct foreground, middle ground and atmospheric distance. The denseness of the vegetation, however, evokes an enveloping mystery.