Lesley Eby won last year’s Margaret Harwell Art Museum’s juried Art Guild exhibition with “Pulling Together,” an oil painting of a mule team. Her success came from a dedicated artistic practice that began when she was young.
“My dad taught me to draw because he was an artist,” she said. Stanley Weinert was a disabled Navy veteran and stay-at-home father. Eby also gained insight into craftsmanship and creative passion from her mother, Floy Weinert, a seamstress, beautician and quilter.
Eby earned her degree in advertising design and later returned to school for a teaching degree. During that time, she relocated to Poplar Bluff, where her family lived in her teens, and began teaching Spanish at Bloomfield High School. From the birth of her eldest son onward, Eby started painting portraits on the side in her life, and found ways to stay creative at work, such as designing elaborate sets for prom.
Her artistic exploration took her through several mediums before she tried oils.
“Once I started painting in oil I thought, this is my one thing because it encompasses so much,” she said.
Determined to improve, Eby took a leap and began submitting to art shows, knowing the prospect of displaying her pieces would drive her to grow.
“I knew that if I would show my work, it’d have to be worth showing,” she explained.
Her strategy was a success. She won her first honorary mention a few years ago in Cape Girardeau for a painting of a fellow teacher’s children.
Eby’s process begins with photos, often taken by herself or friends, and she favors compositions with dramatic lighting. When an image seizes her interest, she is compelled to paint it, starting by laying out a drawing of her subject in pencil before outlining it in thin acrylic paint. Acrylics have a different makeup than oil paints, so even if Eby scrubs all the oils off her canvas and starts over, the basic design remains.
Next, she blocks in larger shapes and begins painting background to foreground and darkest colors to lightest, with colors mixed from a limited palette of red, yellow, blue and white.
Sometimes she needs to change her composition on the fly.
“I do change it as I go, because I use a photo and sometimes I have to change the drawing because it’s not right. You see it in the planes of the face,” she said.
She summed up the rest of the painting as a matter of persistence.
“You just hammer away at it until it looks good.”
Eby’s go-to subjects are people and animals. She particularly loves painting horses, or mules in harness, such as those in “Pulling Together” and another piece, “Sharing the Load.”
“I loved all the buckles and chains juxtaposed against the organic shape of the animal,” she said, remembering her first mule painting. “I just really liked that.”
Finishing a painting requires motivation, which Eby finds in the process itself. She is eager to paint from the moment she wakes up.
“I’m just addicted to it. I just love to do it, it’s so much fun,” she said.
Eby is now passing on her love of painting through her morning high school art classes, having retired from full-time work when her youngest son graduated high school. She initially avoided teaching art for fear it would rob the joy from the process. Earlier in life, it could have, but now she loves it.
“I think that I had to be older and a better teacher, maybe, before I taught art,” she said.
She urges her students not to start an artwork wanting perfection.
“You never learn anything if you start out wanting everything to be perfect,” Eby said. “You have to fail to learn. You have to struggle.”
Eby’s work will be on display at the Margaret Harwell Art Museum’s 68th annual juried exhibition, which opens 1-4 pm. Sunday, Oct. 3, and includes an award ceremony.