biography
September Vhay’s Biography With a respect for nature that radiates through her paintings, Jackson Hole artist September Vhay is an impressive emerging talent in animal art. She has shown her work at prestigious national shows such as Birds in Art®, the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s Western Visions, The American Academy of Equine Art, the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and the American Watercolor Society. She recently won the Fine Print Imaging Award in the 2008-09 Ex Arte Equinus International Equine Art Competition, and placed fourth in that competition’s painting category. Her work is classic in subject matter and technique—a bear, two coyotes running, a trumpeter swan—and at the same time modern in her composition and minimal approach. Backgrounds drop away so that her muted earthen palette can evoke the very essence of an animal. Her paintings are realistic in form and detail, yet they possess an impressionistic aura as well, a looseness that adds a sensitive dimension. In addition to wildlife, Vhay has a passion for painting horses that dates back to her childhood on a ranch in Carson City, Nevada, where she grew up surrounded by wildlife, horses, and art. Speaking about her work, Vhay says, “My challenge and subsequent reward is to reorder reality by distilling it to its essence. It is in this essence where the truth of subject lies. Beauty resides in this truth. It is a pleasure to seek out this essence and to share it with others.” A largely self-taught artist, Vhay’s formal training is in architecture. She received her Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Oregon in 1993. She subsequently moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she worked in architecture for ten years and painted in her spare time. Her understanding of structure, composition, and light—so crucial in architecture—give her paintings a sense of three-dimensional form. In addition to architecture, she was also influenced by the work of her great-grandfather Guzton Borglum, who was famous for sculpting Mount Rushmore and other prominent national monuments. It was his comparatively smaller-scale work that Vhay admired. Her grandmother’s home was full of Borglum’s paintings and sculptures which planted seeds for Vhay’s future career. Initially Vhay worked exclusively in watercolor. At the age of twenty-three, she spent six months studying watercolor painting and architecture in Denmark, under the tutelage of professors from the Royal Academy of Copenhagen. In 1992, she was awarded the Rosenberg Traveling Scholarship, which allowed her to travel to Scotland to study and paint the buildings of famous painter and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Vhay says, “Watercolor painting is spontaneous and unpredictable. There is always an element of risk as alterations are difficult if not impossible to make. These aspects make it a challenging, yet exciting medium. It is a balance of careful planning, jumping in, and then knowing when to let go.” Now devoted full-time to painting, Vhay has expanded her media to include oils. Because of her skill with watercolor, she seamlessly achieves the freshness of watercolor with the saturation of color only possible in oils. One of her mentors, the award-winning painter Scott Christensen, says, “September really gets the subtle transitions and separations of warm and cool colors, and how they merge. She understands the characteristics of light.” She is currently showing her original work at Trio Fine Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. A series of her wildlife and horse paintings are offered as limited edition reproductions, which can be viewed at Trio Fine Art or on her web page at www.vhay.com. These editions are produced using the Giclee (pronounced Zhee-Clay) printing process; small in number, they are individually signed and numbered.