TRINITY – Ever since Gaye Frances Willard was old enough to scribble on the wall with a crayon, she has loved art.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Trinity woman has become a successful portrait artist. What may surprise you, though, is that most of Willard’s commissions – “99.9 percent of my work,” she says – come from out-of-state customers.

That should tell you how good she is. She’s not merely selling portraits to friends and neighbors who commission her because they know her; she’s selling them to total strangers largely on the sole basis of seeing and appreciating the quality of her work.

Willard took up portraiture in 1997, after taking a local portrait-painting class.

“I painted my first portrait (a depiction of her youngest daughter, Kelly), and I just fell in love with portraits,” she recalls. “I’ve been painting them ever since.”

Willard believes it’s faces that attracted her to portraiture.

“I’m fascinated with faces – how everybody has the same features but still is so completely different,” she explains.

“I’m fascinated by how much you can see in the eyes – happiness, peacefulness, sorrow. You can see a lot by studying a face. There’s a lot of emotion with painting people. Even if I paint a building or something, I like to put something alive in it, like a dog or something. I just really like having something alive in my paintings.”

Willard especially likes painting children, she says, “because they’re unpretentious.”

“That’s not meant as a slam against adults, but adults understand to put on a certain look for their portrait. Children are so unpretentious about how they really are, whereas adults present themselves as how they want to be seen. And pets are the same way as children – there’s an innocence to them.”

Like many portrait artists, Willard works primarily from photographs.

“Because so much of my work comes from out of state, I never have the opportunity to meet most of the people I paint,” she says, “so I ask for as many photo references as anybody can provide me with.”

Even then, Willard adds, working strictly from photographs poses a challenge.

“Photos can be somewhat deceiving because they’re flat images,” she says, “and sometimes people photograph different from how they really look. Even if I use a photo, if I’ve seen the person, it makes a huge difference to me.”

As Willard’s business and reputation began to grow, people began asking her to paint portraits of their pets, and that has become a major part of her business.

“Pets become family members, so a lot of times when someone loses their pet, they want something that is a memory of the pet,” she explains. “And a lot of times, people just want a portrait of their pet, just like they would their child.”

A relatively new venture for Willard has been her series of Santa Claus portraits, releasing a new piece every year at Christmas. This year’s release, titled “The Reason,” is her third. The painting depicts Santa sitting in a chair – surrounded by a Christmas tree, stockings and a napping reindeer – reading his Bible.

“I do these portraits in combination with my belief of what Christmas is all about, and that’s the coming of Christ,” Willard says. “I have put Santa there as a representation of all mankind – not the icon with the red suit, but a representation of all mankind in general – and the images evoke a lot of emotion in people that see them.”

Another new venture for Willard is the publication of a children’s book, titled “I Wonder,” which is based on a poem written by her late mother.

The 30-page paperback book, which Willard wrote and illustrated, explores the life of Jesus as a child, imagining what things He might’ve loved as a child – looking at clouds, walking in the rain, a special friendship, a beloved pet. The book includes a parents’ page which gives biblical references to the things recorded about Jesus during His time on earth.

“I’m really excited about the book,” Willard says. “I took my mother’s poem and rewrote it, and it literally felt like she was there with me when I did it – I felt a real connection with her.”

The book, like her other work, is available through her website, www.portraitartistnc.com.

jtomlin@hpe.com | 888-3579