Debbie High 

           Debbie High, who lives with her husband in a small town in Mississippi, has been painting since she was thirty-nine. On a whim, in 1992, she took an oil class. Since then she has traveled the United States and beyond to learn from some of the most accomplished contemporary artists including Ann Templeton, Peggy Kroll-Roberts, Charles Sovek and William F. Reese. Her award-winning paintings hang in private and corporate collections throughout the United States. She has had seven solo exhibitions and numerous group showings since 1997. As a signature member of Alla Prima International, she travels with a select group to a range of geographic locations to paint plein-air. Rendering traditional subjects such as figures, still lifes and landscapes, she stands in the tradition of American Impressionism, placing her own mark upon it.

Debbie’s discovery of oils revolutionized her life. “I loved playing in the mud as a child. It is tactile and sensuous. Oils are sensuous. Sexy. Earthy. Wild. When I found them I was hooked,” she says. “My paintings are bold and often on the verge of ‘out of control,’ a sort of adrenaline rush if you will, a bodacious celebration of vibrant color and expressive brushwork with thick paint.” Oils, Debbie found, were her calling. She believes a calling is something about which one is passionate and talent is intense desire; and desire itself is the God-given gift. Debbie’s art proves that desire is, in fact, the authority to embark upon the journey of the calling.

During a formative trip to Carmel, California, wandering through its galleries, she saw a vast array of ways to ‘do it.’ Painting, she realized, was endless territory with ample room and a variety of tools for exploration and expression of her own truth. “Someone else always completed me,” she says. “I married at age eighteen, out of my parents’ house. First I was somebody’s daughter, then somebody’s wife, then somebody’s mother.” By painting, Debbie had entered a landscape in which completion comes wholly from within herself.

Her highest priority is to remain faithful to her truth, faithful to what she actually sees as she puts pigment to canvas. “This brilliance of color is all around us, for everyone to see,” she says. “You have to know ‘how to see’ in order to find it.” Her insistence upon rendering her vision truthfully constructs the signature component of her paintings. It is incandescence. As any colorist does, she creates form and composition with pigment and stroke, but her unique manipulation of these two elements also produces this incandescence. It is second only to composition as her unifying principle.

If color is defined by three factors – hue, value and saturation – then Debbie is a master of tensions among these three. She optimizes the intensity of the viewer’s experience by pushing these tensions to the extreme edge, beyond which they no longer make sense. At that edge she pulls back and continues her construction of form. In short, Debbie’s paintings carry a brightness or brilliance that is less a scaler quality of color, as pigment laid on canvas, than it is a total effect of her manipulation of the three factors that define color. She states: “I am mindful of how the eye travels through the painting, juxtaposing colors and shapes that create a pleasing vibration or evoke an exciting tension. I push color as far as I can while retaining form. When I started painting I wanted to put only intense colors on the canvas. I ran into trouble with teachers because from intensity ‘there is nowhere to go.’ The painting is difficult to control. Ann Templeton finally gave me permission to do this.”

Using a large palette consisting of the brightest, cleanest pigments she can find, avoiding earth and toned-down colors, she starts thin and builds to a thick paint. Drawing a loose sketch, she works out her composition, then applies an abstract lay-in with large shapes and soft edges, sometimes on previously-toned canvas. As she builds the paint she creates form and brings light into the composition. Intuition leads.

Debbie considers intuition essential for production of passionate and heartfelt work. Sometimes she steps away from the canvas and realizes that three hours, which felt like three minutes, have passed. “When that happens, the feeling is so good it carries me through the next twenty paintings,” she says. She describes this absorption as oneness with God, the universe, every teacher she has ever had, all the people she has ever loved and every dear friend. This process of turning a blank canvas into the ‘essence of a subject’ in the form of an image that may last for hundreds of years continues to be a wonder to her.

The varying frequencies of light produced by her manipulation of pigment and brush seem to strike a single clear note, as if she turns color into luminance and luminance into a spectral feature. That note is her dazzling vision of the world. It reverberates with optimism, joy, vibrancy, beauty and freedom.

An excellent artists and communicator Debbie shares her unique perspective with others by teaching an occasional workshop.