With a careful eye and steady brush, Conway artist Jeanetta Darley unearths hidden messages found in nature through her realistic nature acrylics.
Darley describes herself as a technical, detail-oriented artist.
“For me, the gratification in making the art is I love putting in all the details and making them look as real as I possibly can,” she said.
Darley said that she has been doing art for as long as she can remember. “My mom still has drawings that I was doing at 18 months old,” Darley said.
Darley added her father was a woodworker and that her mother sewed, “so that idea of just creating and making things is just probably in my DNA.”
Darley studied theater and art at Ouachita Baptist University but she said she had not considered art as a full-time career until 15 years ago.
In her work, Darley explores the intricate details of the natural world that often go unnoticed or overlooked.
“I’m a details person. I figured out after 48 years that I don’t see the world the way everybody does. There are things that I notice that seem obvious to me that other people haven’t noticed.”
“I think lots of people tend to look at things as a larger piece and look at it as a whole instead of looking at the parts that make things up.”
Darley said she has been drawn to the outdoors since a child.
“I spent a lot of my childhood in the woods and climbing trees and just playing and a lot of make-believe and a lot of imagination,” she said, adding that as a child she played in the blossoms of her family’s mimosa tree and made crowns with the flowers and the bean pods.
Darley said that those who come to her booth can see her detailed closeups of nature and see tableaus of their past.
“I feel like some of our strongest emotions come from the awe that we feel when we’re in big natural places … but I also feel like we kind of get those same biochemical endorphins when we see something that really harkens back to our past or something that we remember from our childhood,” she said.
“Tons of people are really attached to my ginkgo paintings because I feel like there are certain plants and trees — ginkgo is one of them, and mimosa blossoms are another one — that for some reason, they seem very magical to people. And everybody’s got a story about a ginkgo tree that they saw growing up or they walked by or it was in their grandparents’ yard,” she said.
“And so I feel like a lot of my subject matter because it’s so nature-based sometimes people really connect with that sort of nostalgia.
“So that’s very special when I’ve captured something and somebody sees it and it has a completely different story than what I was going for but people come up with their own stories as well,” Darley said.
Darley added she likes to do pet and house commissions for people to bring about that same sense of nostalgia.
“We have our phones and we can keep pictures of things and remember them, but for some reason, seeing those tangible objects just sort of harkens back to that,” she said.
Darley said that recently she has been experimenting more with including stories in her work using floriography, also known as the language of flowers.
She used this technique in her painting “Mothers and Daughters” which uses poppies, pomegranate, narcissus and wheat to symbolically tell the story of Persephone and Demeter from Greek mythology.
Darley said most of her artistic process involves her going outside and taking pictures of whatever catches her eye.
Darley said she routinely enjoys going on weekend hikes with her husband and camping in their renovated 1995 Volkswagen Eurovan.
Darley said, “My husband and I went on a hike in a nature reserve area outside of Clinton and he has just kind of become accustomed to the fact that he’s going to be maybe a quarter mile ahead of me on every hike because I am stopping probably every 20 feet to take a picture.
“I’m working on some series now that are very close-up paintings of things that you would see in nature whether it’s moss, lichen, tree bark, leaves or the tiniest of fern fronds and I put them together in a collage in a painting,” she said.
“I just assemble them in my mind kind of the way you would assemble a flower arrangement to where it kind of almost breaks down these very real examples of nature into just the elements of art — color and shape and form,” she said. “And when you look at them all together, it kind of becomes an abstract painting, but in actuality, it’s a very highly detailed, hyper-realistic painting.”
Darley has displayed her work in various art shows, walks, conventions, pop-ups and businesses across Conway, Little Rock and Fayetteville.
Darley said she has been involved with the Conway Art Walk since the beginning and has helped with organizing the displaying artists.
Darley said she thinks events like art walks help to avoid gatekeeping in the art community.
“It’s a great way to give the public — and especially the public that might not always be exposed to art — the opportunity to go to art,” she said.
“Art doesn’t have to be this super unattainable thing that people who are not of a certain economic class can appreciate art and buy art for their homes, too.”
Darley said she encourages artists to use items such as prints and cards to help make their art more accessible to those who want to support the art community, but who cannot afford to buy original works.
Darley will be at the Studio Downtown on Feb. 2 at 5 p.m. to give a class called “How to get people to stop walking and look at your art!” where she will advise artists how to make eye-catching table displays for their art.
Darley will also join the Central Arkansas Collective on Feb. 2 at its exhibition opening at 1120 Oak St. from 6-8 p.m.
Darley’s work can be found at her permanent booth inside American Jane Vintage, or online at her website jeanettadarley.com or her Instagram @jeanettadarley.
