DeSoto Magazine June 2021

Page 24

exploring art | MEGAN GRINDER

Exploring the Faces of Art By Pam Windsor | Photography courtesy of Amy Threadgill

Memphis portraiture artist Megan Grinder found her calling later in life, and discovered joy in honoring successful and inspiring women. Memphis painter Megan Grinder has always loved art. “I really can’t remember a time when I didn’t do art,” Grinder says. “At school, I would always gravitate to the easel and it was always like play, which it was when I was little.” In fact, that’s how she saw creating art growing up, something she did for fun, as an escape from schoolwork, or later, as a welcome break from a heavy college course load. She never considered art as a viable career option until her sophomore year at Princeton. Grinder planned to study architecture in graduate school and thought majoring in art history as an undergraduate would serve as a good complement to that career. A professor told her about a dual visual arts and 26 DeSoto

art history program. Grinder applied and got accepted. That program opened new doors for her into the world of art. “I got to study painting in France which was a wonderful opportunity,” she recalls. “I got a lot more technical instruction and color theory there, the kind of thing I didn’t really get at Princeton. And that same summer I took a portraiture seminar in Brittany in the northern part of France from an artist named Daniel Green. That was really the first time I deliberately painted people.” Painting people intrigued her, and Grinder wanted to delve deeper. “It led me to do a whole body of work for my senior thesis in college on faces and facial details and light acting on faces. That was sort of what gave me the background


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