Beth Stafford is a painter who creates colorful, ethereal. organic  compositions which incorporate the computer and digital photography as tools, along with the brushes and paint. Her images are refined abstractions of flowers and other mostly natural elements.  She works with oil pastels on top of inkjet grounds, and also uses sketches worked out in the computer as the basis for larger acrylic paintings on canvas and panel. Her current interest is in "photo-painting": digital photos that are turned into art in the computer. Stafford is a 2005 recipient of a Regional Artist Project Grant, sponsored in part by the North Carolina Arts Council. She has shown her work extensively in North Carolina and has had gallery shows in Charlotte, Raleigh, Southern Pines, and Blowing Rock. Stafford's work has been accepted in 68 juried shows, national as well as regional, and she has received 41 awards, including eight First Place Awards. Her paintings are included in many corporate collections, among them those of American Express, Wachovia, Phillip Morris USA, Oxford University Press, and the United States Department of State.Stafford received her Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1978, and a Bachelor of Science from North Carolina State University in 1971. She was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1949, and has lived all over the state, with rural Concord as her longest residency.

Check out her blogs, "Bear Dances & Bird Songs," at www.bethstafford.blogspot.com , and "Art With Love from PiCassieO" at www.airedale-art.blogspot.com .

At www.Charlotte.com/cabarrus , there is an article about Stafford's digital art produced in collaboration with her Airedale, Cassie.  Look in the Archive for April 13, 2008.