I paint in the traditional style maybe best described as leaning on Impressionism. VanGogh, Monet, Cézanne & Nicolai Fechin are my most important teachers. I was born in Alsace France and Impressionism is simply in my blood.
I have looked at and studied their art and techniques with passion. I have probably been born 150 years too late. My heart lies with the great Impressionists that painted authentic pieces that reflected their lives, surroundings and culture.

By now, I have developed a style of my own, guided and influenced by Impressionist principles. I use brush and knife and even fingers and use oil paints generously. To me “PAINT” is what “PAINT”ing is all about, and color too. However I don't just throw on paint for paint sake as some sort of a gimmick. Each brush stroke each knife application has a purpose. I don't thin my paints and I don't use fillers. I use pure oil paints rich in pigments. My work requires time, patience and knowledge, since oil paints dry slowly and I often work in layers.

I just completed a view art shows in Florida and South Carolina and I wish everyone here could come and see my work in real life. Mostly the feedback I get is that the colors are incredible and the knife and brushwork show skill and high quality work. If you have questions or If you like to arrange for a private showing please contact me. ginette@ginettefineart.com

As far as my watercolors are concerned, I again developed a style uniquely my own. It just came about out of my love for ink lines and the watercolor medium so I combined them both. I like to draw in ink, where I know I cannot erase anything. I like spontaneity, in live as well as in my art and I like happy accidents. I like that feeling of not knowing for sure what’s around that next corner, when I paint in watercolor and ink I get that. Many of my watercolors become later inspirations for oil paintings and sometimes visa versa.

Paul Cézanne wrote in a letter to his friend Emile Bernard... "The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go forth to study beautiful nature, let us try to free our minds from them, let us try to express ourselves according to our own personal temperament!" This expresses perfectly how I feel about my approach to my art.

Please see my blog ginettefineart.com/Blog and sign up for email alerts for future shows maybe even in your area, so you can come and see my pieces in person.

Over the years I had many accolades and won numerous awards. To the chagrin of my Friends, I hardly keep track of them. I always feel funny tooting my own horn. I'm trying to get better with that, so I have a blog now and when something happens I try to blog about it. Still feels funny to tell everyone, I now have five paintings hanging at the Georgia State Capital, sounds like bragging, but I was told I should tell you. So I do. I must say I was very excited about an article that appeared last year in the Worlds largest English speaking Newspaper the "Times of India" The Speaking Tree.

In The Wild Garden

In the paradise of the natural order, Ginette Callaway’s copperhead snake sheds the burden of its demonisation, writes Rupa Sengupta.
In Georgia, US, copperhead snakes often get trod on for being hard to tell from the ground. Freezing when frightened, they get run over on the roads. They bite, but only when in danger. With hourglass-shaped marks on their yellowish bodies, these shy, water-loving reptiles thrive in the Okefenokee.

Home to wildlife from heron and crane to otter and black bear, the Okefenokee is a wetland run through by the borders of Georgia and Florida. Visitors who go canoeing there speak of getting high on oxygen the lush plants release. When they leave, they claim to bear away the nocturnal music of frogs and insects.

Some also recall, with unease, poisonous flowers, menacing foliage, stifling humidity, heart-breaking beauty tinged with dread, death and decay. The swamp is called the “land of the trembling earth”: the ground shakes, there being an unstill, teeming water-world beneath the peat. And what indeed is the Okefenokee but dark primeval water, where alligators dream?
It’s a perfect multi-hued landscape for any artist: ripeness and rot meshing in the miraculous instant that is life, a flowering at dusk no less wondrous for its eventual passing. It is a place of precariously reconciled contradictions: carnivorous plants — pitcher and sundew — and venomous creatures coexisting with water-lily and white-tail deer!
The Okefenokee could not but inspire a “New Monet” like Ginette Callaway, a US-based painter who loves horses and cats and wild birds…and snakes. Her love of nature shows in a forceful, if beguilingly eye-pleasing, work that speaks to the heart even as it subverts its moral categories. The canvas, ‘Copperhead Snake in the Okefenokee’, unveils a Garden of Eden rarely seen. If a serpent lurks there, it’s not as tempter leading man astray. In the paradise of the natural order, Callaway’s copperhead sheds the burden of its demonisation like old skin during hibernation.
Humanity’s abiding myths mostly tell of nature as a backdrop to human history, rather than of man as part of a larger living cosmos. These anthropocentric narratives seem to lend themselves to a subtle reworking in this painting. Their linearity is wrecked in an explosion of colour in a sentient universe without contours. Their narcissism is deflated not just by man’s absence from the scene, but in the fullness of the universe without him.

‘Everything shimmers and moves with the deftness of the artist's brushstrokes. Everything is itself and something else. The blue-black water is mirror to polychromatic fires. Palm leaves are floating islands. A flower bud is foil to a blossom that opens to reveal a red heart — Eve’s apple? — already fruit to insects. The wildflower dominates the frame, bending as if in an act of benediction.

And there, at the base, the snake: beautiful as a coral ring, strangely more fragile than the transient petals above it. As in creation and fertility myths, here too the snake is earth’s emissary. The circularity of the reptilian body is an ancient symbol of the cycles of life, death and rebirth, an umbilical cord joining earth and the life it spawns.
Yet, Callaway’s snake seems to represent more than self-replicating matter. That it lifts its head — rupturing the circle of its body and the cycle of its symbolic function — is an artistic sleight of hand. Though an ‘earth-hugger’, the snake turns its gaze upwards as if at an altar. It contemplates the blazing crucifix-shaped flower, as if drawn toward that force within nature that imbues all life with the power of spiritual transcendence.
The viewer is left asking questions. What is good? What is evil? What is necessary? What is contingent? What is nature? What is spirit? The Okefenokee, dark and mysterious, hums and sings and slumbers. The warbler’s wing catches the sun... See the Image of the Article in my Blog