Penny McCrea
Penny is an artist using a camera and different mediums to capture the beauty of her countryside through nature’s changing patterns. Having grown up in rural Western Pennsylvania, she is particularly sensitive to the intrinsic beauty of farms, fields, woods and streams. In the early seventies, she settled in Maryland and lived on a farm straddling the Frederick/Montgomery County line – part of Montgomery County’s agricultural preserve. She loves the undulating hills in the landscape and the all-too-rapidly-disappearing farmland. Sugarloaf Mountain and the C&O Canal were close by and were recurring themes in her paintings. Upon retiring, she moved to Maryland’s Eastern Shore where she observed a totally different “waterscape” of tidewater rivers, marshes and big skies.
As a child, she was always interested in art. She was voted most artistic in her high school class. She attended Acadia University and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She worked as a commercial interior designer for all of her adult career. Upon retiring, she resumed her passion for the fine arts and started painting again. She keeps her camera handy to capture interesting images and returns to her studio to manipulate and enlarge them as photographs. Other times, she may feel the image would work better as a painting and will reproduce it as a pastel, oil or watercolor. It’s always interesting to see what may evolve.
