Teresa Mallen — The Delight is in the Detail
by Sally Hansen
Teresa Mallen marvels at the exquisite intricacy of nature’s floral handiwork, and enjoys every minute spent at her drafting table, creating permanent coloured pencil celebrations of the ephemeral beauty that nature so abundantly bestows.
Until she was in her thirties, Mallen laboured under the false impression that drawing was a natural talent distributed at birth. She always loved visiting art galleries and shows, but her occasional attempts at arts and crafts projects had not revealed her potential as a visual artist. She majored in music in university, married her high school sweetheart, and pursued other interests, until one day she sat down with pencil and paper and discovered she could draw. Today she is an accomplished coloured pencil artist and an art instructor, and happily describes herself as “a poster child for the late bloomer”.
The Delight is in the Detail
Mallen’s choice of coloured pencils as a medium is the result of a rewarding exploration into her own psyche and personality. She explored many media — watercolours, acrylics, oils, ink, graphite — on her journey of self-discovery. “In a round-about way, discovering who I was not and accepting who I am led me to the art I do today.”
Professional grade coloured pencils provided the detailed control over line and form, combined with the painterly approach to applying colour, that Mallen was looking for. Primarily self-taught, she developed her technique over years of practice, first learning from books, and eventually joining the Colored Pencil Society of America, founded in 1990.
Like any professional visual or performance artist, Teresa is sometimes amused by the reactions viewers express when they first encounter her art. “If you’re just using coloured pencils, how do you get it to look like that?” is a common query that contributed to her decision to share her passion by becoming a coloured pencil art instructor.
In fact, coloured pencil art is not a fast medium. The gorgeous hues and textural effects Mallen accomplishes in her paintings are achieved by building up colours through the carefully planned application of many layers of pencil colour. This results in the striking three-dimensional quality of her beautiful floral paintings. Different strokes are essential to the process, and must be practiced until they become almost automatic. The choice of “canvas” requires knowledge of the process by which the “tooth” of the paper determines the outcome.
As I learned on her well-designed website, “Professional grade coloured pencils are designed by chemists to produce a core of shaped and bonded pigment, which is wrapped in a wooden casing. The bonding process uses wax or oil to give each pencil its colour-spreading qualities. Many properties are taken into consideration, including pigment composition, lightfastness, hardness/softness, colour consistency, and lay-down characteristics.”
Sharing Her Bliss
Raised on a dairy farm in Elgin, a half hour south of Smiths Falls, Teresa and her husband, Mark Harris, moved to the Ottawa area in 1987 so Mark could pursue his career as a mechanical engineer. They bought their current house in Constance Bay ten years later largely because of its natural surroundings and ready access to Torbolton Forest and the beaver pond down the road. Married almost 23 years, she describes Harris as “a wonderful man and an incredible husband”. He is also her computer tech guy, and he does the woodworking for the custom framing of her images. Teresa considers herself enormously lucky to have been able to “follow her bliss” full time because of his support.
In typical Mallen fashion, Teresa has painstakingly documented the knowledge she has acquired through years of trial and error and practice to create instruction kits that shorten the learning curve for busy people who want to try coloured pencil art for themselves. She has developed affordable kits to be used either in conjunction with a course, or independently. Since most of us can retain only a small portion of what we are invited to absorb over several hours or days of concentrated instruction, the kits offer lasting value as complements to Teresa’s courses. For students interested in distance learning, Teresa will soon be offering her introductory course online, via her website.
April is a good month to experience Teresa’s talents as an artist and as an instructor. She is offering her “Introduction to Coloured Pencil” weekend workshop on April 14 and 15, and her “Beyond the Basics” class on April 21. You can register via her website, or call her at 832–2169. Bird lovers will enjoy a busy backyard scene at the many birdfeeders at her home studio in Constance Bay. Art lovers will enjoy Teresa’s gift for sharing her enthusiasm for living life to its fullest, and her passion for interpreting and capturing the beauty of nature as a permanent work of fine art. At the very least, she will teach you how to better see the beauty that surrounds us.
Red Trillium Studio Tour
The West Carleton Red Trillium Studio Tour on Mother’s Day weekend (May 12 and 13) will provide a wonderful opportunity to meet Teresa Mallen and watch her demonstrate the techniques that enable her to create superbly detailed, richly hued and wondrously realistic coloured pencil images. Details of the Tour will be available at their website. Some of Teresa’s work can also be seen at the Heart and Soul Café in Dunrobin, starting Easter weekend, April 7.
The “Tips” page at her website provides a good example of the thoroughness and generosity with which Teresa Mallen shares her hard-earned knowledge. You can also see for yourself at her online “Gallery” why people sometimes wonder how she does it with “just” coloured pencils. You can contact Teresa by phone at 832–2169, by email or via her website.