AHLIN Area 5

Artists Bio:

AHLIN was educated at Boston University, The Corcoran College of Art + Design, with Gene Davis of the Washington Color School Painters, Millard Sheets of Scripps College, Sumi-e brushwork at the Smithsonian with Keiko Hiratsuka, and was Sous Chef for Julia Child on the French Chef TV series. A former pilot and consultant to The President’s Aviation Commission, she served for a dozen years as Vice President and Congressional Liaison of USAir in the nation’s capitol.

One day, however, at the age of 40 she chucked the Amelia Earhart life for the Georgia O’Keefe life and did what she always wanted to do—just paint!

She founded an inner city school in Washington, DC, The Boat House Art School, was Adjunct Professor at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida for 10 years, and Artist-In-Residence at the Maitland Art & History Museum. Her own art study tours in the United States and abroad have included C & O Canal, D. C. & Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, New Mexico, Copenhagen, Portugal’s Algarve, France-painting in Monet’s Giverny gardens, Assisi and Venice, Italy, as well as workshops. Among them are several islands: Whidby, Mackinac, & Monhegan Island, Maine.

Distinguished by numerous awards, AHLIN’s work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally in museums. She has had 40 solo shows and her paintings hang at Universal Studios in Florida, the Inter-American Development Bank and three embassies in Washington, DC, and in private collections. Of those, the most recent are that of actors Robert Stack and Richard Chamberlain, Baryshinkov, Emily & Glenn Tremml of Vero Beach, FLorida and Mr. & Mrs. Robert Montgomery, Palm Beach, FLorida.

She is a frequent juror of Watermedia competitions. AHLIN’S work is at the Watergate Gallery, Washington, DC, The Lupine Gallery on Monhegan Island. She is President of the Florida Artists’ Group; sustaining member of The American Watercolor Society and Florida Watercolor Society, and is listed in “Who’s Who of American Women”.

Artist Statement:

The mission of art is to bring out the unfamiliar from the most familiar. The emotional response to the scene and its essence is always the more rewarding. To let the hand and eye run free. To let the brush dance across the paper with liveliness and imagination us soul satisfying.

None have shown more vitality in every stroke of the brush than the oriental painters in their capturing with a gesture of the fleeting moment. I paint layers of colors–of whatever value or intensity–to capture nature’s chaos.

Japanese Haiku is an expression of this philosophy; a statement of feeling that suggests a complete picture of moo, time and imagery.

A painting, like a Haiku, “Should not mean, but be.”