About Betsy Potter
Betsy Potter is an artist, poet and naturalist. She grew up in a small housing development in Wheatfield, New York and her first experiences with nature came from wandering through old hedgerows and fallow farmland in the fields surrounding her home. Although not as rich in diversity as places she has come to know over the years, this exposure to nature during childhood provided her with a strong love of the land and a special appreciation for birds and butterflies.
Potter’s education in art began at home with prints of the impressionists and post-impressionists on the walls and lots of encouragement to draw and create. Her older sister, who took private art lessons, passed on many things she learned and these became her first art lessons. Assuming that there could only be one artist in the family, she tried writing and music but finally decided that art was her first love. While attending SUNY Empire State College in Buffalo, NY, she also studied drawing and painting at Niagara County Community College, Sanborn, NY, and drawing, painting and printmaking at SUNY at Buffalo.
Together with her partner Willie D’Anna, she has traveled to many regions of the United States and Canada to witness birds and the environments they occupy. These experiences of seeing the beauty of nature in contrast to its ongoing destruction are reflected in her series, the environmental paintings.
Potter’s professional experience includes teaching seminars in landscape painting and drawing for the Niagara Society of Artists. She has also demonstrated various media techniques such as cast plaster printmaking, egg tempera painting and textured acrylic painting for diverse artists’ groups.