Em Campbell
Annapolis, Maryland
// / // soli Deo gloria // / // Naturalist artist Em Campbell has over 15yrs experience working in water-based media, and 10 years teaching.
Message
Em Campbell is a Maryland-based painter working in watercolor, gouache, acrylics, and ink. Her work spans florals, seascapes, abstract landscapes, and wildlife; recurring themes of sea and sky, wilderness and wings that form the foundation of her practice.
Raised in the South, Em spent her childhood outdoors, raising tomatoes with her father and ranging through woods with her brothers. That early intimacy with the natural world became the soil in which both her subject matter and her purpose as an artist grew. She studied fine arts under Maja Godlewska, Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and has since built a practice rooted in close observation of the living world.
Em teaches watercolor at Anne Arundel Community College and Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts. Her collections have been commissioned and acquired by private collectors, displayed in galleries, and recognized in juried exhibitions.
Statement
Central themes of wildness, wonder, wings, and water flow through her work, taking the viewer into another realm; one where wolves and pirates roam.
The swirling ink worlds that define a season of her work emerged from an obsessive study of trees and an abiding love for her backyard birds. To take in the full composition of these spherical landscapes, a viewer must physically shift, bend, turn, move. Em uses this as a living metaphor: to save what is wild and beautiful, we are each required to bend and change in ways we don't expect and may not initially welcome. "I want to change the way you see the world by painting worlds you have to change to see."
Em’s nautical series is an increasingly central thread in her practice, paying homage to historic themes of the western seafaring world with the same attention to light, narrative weight, and the real power and healing beauty of the natural world. “We enter wilderness and wild waters as sojourners; care and respect are the price of passage.”