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Linda Cheek has made a career of landscape painting since 1990 when she gave up her job as an illustrator for Lockheed and moved to the Marshall, NC, near Asheville. She has a BS degree in Fine Art from the Ringling School is Sarasota, FL. She has also studied with Ken Auster, John Budicin, Bob Rohm, Kenn Backhaus, Doug Dawson, Margaret Dyer and more.
Cheek is well known in the Asheville, NC area as a serious plein air painter and more than once been referred to as "a painters painter" because of her heavy use of paint and painterly brush strokes. Cheek is one of the founding members of the Western North Carolina Plein Air Painters. Her work can be found at a number of galleries in the Southeastern US, including: 16 Patton in Asheville, NC, The Design Gallery in Burnsville, NC, Willow Wisp Farm Studios in Fairview, NC, Friedmans's in Savannah, GA, Ken Farmers Auction House in Virginia, Skinner's in Boston, MA, and she has a permanent painting at the Salmagundi Club in New York; the oldest art club in America, with a reputation to go with it.
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"When possible, I prefer to paint "en plein-air, on the spot" because I feel the mood of the place and my reaction to the surroundings are of vital importance to the production of a good painting. I believe that if I spend a lifetime seriously and humbly studying the beauty of the spots of color made by objects as they come together, it cannot but react on me as part of God's creation and by the time I have painted my 1,000 and 1 paintings, I'll begin to have a glimmer of what beauty is. As the man C.S. Lewis called "my master" George MacDonald expressed it, . . . "we ourselves must will the truth and for that the Lord is waiting . . . The work is His, but we must take our willing share. When the blossom breaks forth in us, the more it is ours, the more it is His." Writer Heney James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: What was the artist trying to achieve? Did he/she succeed? The third- Was is it worth doing?"
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