Carol Rowan

Medium: Oil on wood panel, graphite on paper
Contact: http://www.carolrowan.com
Prices: $800-$20,000 for oils, $800-$14,000 for graphite

Carol Rowan believes in taking her time. Her graphite pencil drawings, which can take up to four months to complete, reflect the patience and precision she puts into every minute detail, from the mane of a horse to the dappled sunlight on a barn roof. Now that she’s focusing on paintings, she insists upon the same exacting quality from her work in a more demanding medium.

“I never, ever rush a painting,” she says emphatically. “You can’t force a painting to have the life you want it to have. Eventually, the painting talks to you, and you know that it’s done.”

Roaming the countryside, Rowan, a Connecticut native who majored in painting at New York’s Pratt Institute, captures scenes on her camera and returns to paint at her in-home Queenstown studio overlooking the Wye River. She paints on wood panel using small sable brushes, which allow her to compose with the same rich detail as her drawings. “You can get a lot more depth with oil paint,” says Rowan. “I start thin and build up thick. Layering the glazes makes a painting very rich and lets the light in.”

Rowan has painted landscapes from Maine to California, but she’s found some of her favorite subjects on the Eastern Shore in places such as Hooper’s Island and Pioneer Point in Queen Anne’s County. She especially loves to paint weathered barns, old churches, and vintage farm trucks—“things that show their age.”

A quietly intense woman, Rowan, whose work can be seen at the Carla Massoni Gallery in Chestertown, the Long View Gallery in Washington, D.C. and Sperryville, Va., and the Vose Galleries of Boston, demands much of herself. “It’s taken me years to bring my paintings up to the quality of my drawing,” she says.

“Painting is ten times harder than graphite, but I constantly push myself to do something harder.”