Finding beauty in the Desert Southwest

Hi! I am Perianne Grignon and I am a watercolor hobbyist. Luckily, I discovered painting after having spent decades in the advertising agency and corporate world running big media services operations. I discovered art only a dozen years ago while living in Manhattan and started to carry around a sketchbook. New York has such a rich amount of subject matter for sketching on the go! At the time, we had an apartment in a high-rise in Lower Manhattan that had a roof-top terrace. On Sundays, I would head up to the roof to relax with a copy of the Sunday New York Times and would doodle in the margins with a blunt pencil sketching the rooftop gargoyles of the neighboring buildings. Soon, I picked up a real sketchbook and sharpener for my pencil, and my love of graphite sketching soon moved on to watercolor and I’ve never looked back. Where the corporate world can be full of tight timetables and complexities, art has been an opportunity to relax and push away the comparisons and analytics. I approach learning with a beginner’s mindset and seek to evolve as I encounter new methods and ideas.

My learning journey has been a mixture of workshops taken with some wonderful artists combined with self-teaching through books and a lot of trial and error. I have taken workshops with artists Geoff Allen, Shari Blaukopf, Pat Fiorello, Roberta Rogers, and Joseph Stoddard, and I am now being mentored by Tracy Lynn Ross.

Living in Tucson, I have met many fellow artists through some terrific organizations including my memberships with Sonoran Plein Air Painters and the Southern Arizona Watercolor Guild where I am a juried member working towards my signature status.

When I think about what I want to convey with a painting, I want someone to yearn to see that place as a new discovery – even if it is a building or landmark that they have seen many times. The beauty of bright sunshine or a summertime sky creates magic for me that I want to capture on the page to share with others.

No rights of reproduction, nor any rights to the paintings/images, unless permission is granted by the artist.