About Her Work: Capturing the Alaska landscape for nearly 40 years, Devita's glowing oil paintings are prized by collectors from coast to coast and overseas. Her paintings range from very large expressive landscape paintings of figures and street scenes to small jewel-like alla prima landscapes painted outdoors, capturing moments in time of wind and sea and light.  Most smaller paintings are completed "plein air"... working outdoors directly from the scene. It is this direct painterly approach, using traditional oil paints, that gives her work the unique fresh style.  Her small paintings generally sell out over the course of the season.
   Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1944 Devita attended Cornish School of Allied Arts in the 1960's where she studied fine art.  In her early career her work was exhibited in New York Coliseum (ART:usa) and at the Atkins Museum in Kansas City. She was selected for the National Hallmark Award and her work appeared on the cover of the Seattle times Sunday magazine.
   Devita worked in commercial art and taught fine art in private schools in Juneau in the 1980's and since 1994, has had numerous solo exhibits of her paintings in Juneau, Alaska, including several at Portfolio Arts Gallery through 2001. In 1995, her paintings were selected for a juried exhibition of the Central Washington Artists Guild, and she had solo exhibits in the Chotte Gallery in 1996 and 1997.  Completed in 2001 and 2002, are large scale paintings permanently installed in Carnival Cruise Lines' new ships, the Carnival Legend and the Carnival Conquest. (See Media and Credits)

Artist’s Statement: (see also Biography)
   While studying fine arts, I fell in love with oil paints. I love the luminosity, the variety of texture, and permanency. Although I still prefer oils for smaller paintings, I am able to duplicate their effect quite nicely in acrylics on larger paintings. 
   Because a painting is my response to the whole environment, I am enticed to work plein air and directly from the subject matter.  Even my large scale paintings are birthed outdoors. The physical challenges of working outdoors allows me to be involved in my surroundings, which contributes to originality and creativity.  To quote  Boudin, the nineteenth century impressionist, “Three brushstrokes painted from nature are worth more than 2 days work in the studio.”
   My goal is not to do a literal representation of what I  see, but to express my response to what I see while at the same time allowing a certain amount of realism.  This  particular balance between realism and abstraction is what  makes every artist unique. To me the individual stroke of paint has integrity in and  of itself in the same way each piece of a mosaic exists as  an individual shape.  Van Gogh summed it up this way, "the most technically complete pictures are seen to be made up of strokes of color placed closely together.  They do not make their effect until you stand a certain distance away  from them. I am more and more convinced that true   painters do not finish their pictures--that is, with  everything so meticulous you could stick your nose into it.”
   My favorite time to paint is late in the evening when the  shadows are longer, the colors are intense, and the time is short which forces me to be spontaneous. I find myself attracted to Post Impressionism and more particularly the Fauvists Emil Nolde and Georges Rouault, with whom I share a similar spiritual heritage.  So I postscript this statement, as did some artists of old, “Sole Deo Gloria”.

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"A painting should be more than meets the eye of the ordinary observer, who sees only what he has been in the habit of looking for."
--Emily Carr