Beth Stafford

Beth Stafford is a painter who started out as a "Southern Realist" and progressed through several other stages represented here. including creating colorful, ethereal, organic  compositions which incorporate the computer and digital photography as tools, along with the brushes and paint. These images are refined abstractions of flowers and other mostly natural elements.  She has worked 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 focus is on wildly colorful digital art made with the help of two talented canines ("nose art") and jewelry derived from that art.

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 in the US, among them those of American Express, Wachovia, Phillip Morris USA, Oxford University Press, and the United States Department of State. Her work may also be found in private collections internationally. 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.