Beth Moreton Anderson graduated from The Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and has shown her work at local art associations and galleries. She has lived most of her life in the Boston area.

As a painter of environments, I am particularly inspired by local New England wetlands and conservation areas: Middlesex County’s Ipswich and Concord Rivers, Lake Quannapowitt, the Middlesex Fells Reservation and the Middlesex Canal. I grew up in Lynnfield, with the swampy Reedy Meadow behind our house, and for many years lived adjacent to wetlands.

As a painter, I am both recorder and interpreter of what I see and choose to paint. The sites that I am motivated to paint are the tranquil, private areas encountered purely by accident. When I discover a new, wonderful spot, the process of recording the place is my way of preserving the moment of discovery. How I present it is my interpretation. If I decide to include fragments of the old granite wall left at the site of the early nineteenth century Lob’s Pound Mill in Reading, the painting testifies that civilization was there at some time in the past. When I paint a site, I may choose to leave out certain elements, such as the tract houses near a Middlesex Canal site, in order to convey a particular emotion or mood. I can represent the landscape in literal detail, or borrow wildly and selectively from the visual chaos of nature. Each decision drastically changes the mood and feeling of the painting. Through light and shadow patterns, I organize the chaos.

I approach a new quilt much the same way as a painting. First, the idea, the image, the inspiration- and for me, that is usually something from nature. Then I mentally edit the image, and the fabric medium determines how closely I want to reproduce realism. Large areas can be painted with wide brushstrokes or cut from a wide swath of fabric. Fine lines can be painted with a liner brush, scraped into wet paint with a palette knife, or stitched onto fabric with thread. Color is another matter: Infinite color gradations of intensity and hue are a given in paint; in fabric, the color is dyed or printed at the textile factory, and I can choose from flat, shiny, printed, irridescent and metallic. When I start a fabric piece, it is frequently the vibrant palette that gets the original idea to gel.