Palm Harbor Florida's Best Art Gallery

June Allard-Berte: How I Go About Painting a Portrait

My Approach :::: My Technique :::: My Vision

For me, painting a portrait begins with listening. I listen intently to my clients, gathering and storing information, filled with observations and impressions. In this meeting, I discover why they have come, what they love, and how they see themselves.
Next—based on my years of design—I fashion a backdrop for my clients. I choose a setting that matches their lifestyles, and then I schedule time for a photographic shoot. From these photos, I select every element I need in my portraits. Before I approach my easel and canvas, I refine the portrait in my mind, spending whatever time and energy it requires to achieve a dear concept and a bright visualization to guide me.
Now I begin to paint the portrait of my client in all their specialness, using a traditional manner in a classical style— dark, lean passages and opaqueness in the lights with some brush strokes visible to the viewer. Always I remain open to what my clients continue to show me of themselves. All portraits challenge me to grow in perception, to develop new techniques, and to hold to my artistic integrity. Gradually, the uniqueness that is the client comes alive at the tip of my brush.
Through this creative process, I achieve what has become my ideal: to paint beautiful, authentic, personal portraits that are at the same time works of art with universal, genre appeal.
This, to me, is the essence of portraiture as I know it today!

Tags: artist, florida, June Allard-Berte, paintings, palm harbor, pinellas

Saturday, October 2nd, 2010 Artists No Comments

June Allard-Berte

A native of Springfield, Massachusetts, Allard-Berte” is one of the country’s foremost portraitist. Her paintings appear internationally in private collections, restaurants, and boardrooms of major organizations.

An artist who is able to capture emotion in both her formal and informal paintings, Allard-Berte” images strike a magical note. Her sense of composition is superb; it is endlessly inventive, elegant, and nearly always strikes just the right balance with subject. It does not over or underpower the strength of the person or place.

Private collectors of an Allard-Berte” paintings have acted on taste and private passion. Her work is bold and poetic. For the genre scenes of landscapes, farm animals, still lifes, her work is intimate in a way that the subject matter never could be.

One Woman Shows
Lido Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ 1989
Western New England College, MA 1989 Cross-Roads Gallery, Carmel, CA 1988 Pellington Gallery, Columbus, OH 1987 & 1988 Columbus Art Walks, Columbus, OH 1988 Napa Valley Art Association, CA 1987
Spangler Cummings Gallery, Columbus, OH 1986 Springfield, Library & Museums Assoc., MA 1984 Scalzo Gallery, Belleair Bluffs, FL 2001

Juried Group Shows
Collectors Gallery, Columbus, OH 1988 The Gallery at Mill River, MA 1989
Sinai Temple Art Show, CT 1969
awarded “Best Connecticut Artist” Harley Brown Workshops, Scottsdale, AZ The Copley Society of Boston, Boston, MA
awarded “Juror’s Choice in Painting”

Education
University of Hartford Art School, Hartford, CT Wadsworth Atheneum School of Art, CT Museum of Fine Arts, Stuttgart, GERMANY The National Artist’s Seminars, Chicago, IL Old Lyme Academy, Old Lyme, CT Aaron Shikler Workshop, Old Lyme, CT Art in the Mountains, OR
David Leffel Workshops, Scottsdale, AZ Daniel Green’s Workshops, N. Salem, NY Harley Brown Workshops, Scottsdale, AZ

Memberships
The Salmagundi Art Club, NY
Society of Illustrators, NY
American Portrait Society, NY
COGOP Coast Guard Artist, NY
Metropolitan Portrait Society, NY National Women’s Art Association, NY Greppocorgno, Piegard, Italia

Teaching Experience
Gulf Coast Museum of Art, Largo, FL Cullen of Banffshire, Scotland, UK