BARBARA NECHIS AWS, NWS

Barbara Nechis grew up in New York State and moved to the Napa Valley in Northern California in 1988. She holds a BA in History and Fine Arts from the University of Rochester and an MS from Alfred University. She was a faculty member of Parsons School of Design in NYC for many years and has taught seminars at Pratt Institute and throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

She has served as a juror and board member of the American Watercolor Society and awards judge for more than 60 organizations including National Watercolor Society, Transparent Watercolor Society of America, Audubon Artists NYC, San Diego Watercolor Society, Watercolor West and New England Watercolor Society.

Her work appears in more than 40 books and publications and is included in numerous collections, among them the Butler Institute of American Art, IBM and Citicorp. She is the author of Watercolor from the Heart (Watson-Guptill Publications, 1993) and Watercolor the Creative Experience (North Light Books, 1979) and is featured in three instructional DVDs.

Her work is an exploration using the fundamentally abstract patterns of nature both as a source of inspiration and as a compositional element to produce effects that allude to the proportions and harmonies of the physical landscape without imitating it. She combines abstract principles with knowledge of the form and depth of mountains, rock, trees, crevices, and water, to produce an “abstract realism”. 

Yosemite Autumn