WICKWIRE - "... where the heart finds art."

MERRITT ROACH has been a serious artist, painting for thirty years. She has been a prominent exhibitor and winner in juried shows having won 1st place awards in Onslow County, NC Art League - Kinston, NC Art Counsel Show - Asheville, NC Art League Show and most recently in Henderson County Art League Show with a portrait of her late mother. A native of North Georgia, she now resides in Etowah, NC in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She studied art early in her career at the University of Georgia working towards a BFA in art. She finished her degree at the University of North Carolina, Asheville in 1989.

In pursuing her degree she worked in all media but eventually gravitated to watercolor and pastel. Over a thirty-year span her style has evolved from abstract painting to a style she feels is “quality realism.” In the 1980’s she did a series of paintings based on Pre-Columbian icons and African figures in watercolor, acrylic and pencil. A decade later her focus changed and she produced numerous portraits and nudes in mixed media. In the past seven years she has focused on using pastels, a more opaque medium than watercolor producing vivid and definitive color, a hallmark of her recent work. Throughout her career an exceptional talent in drawing has been evident in her productions.

Merritt loves to experiment with new ideas and contends painting is a form of visual poetry. She feels the artist must listen to her inner guide and paint what she loves, reveres or knows. For the past few years she has focused on botanicals that grow in the gardens in the area where she lives and the places she visits.Her watercolors and pastels are found in numerous financial institutions and corporate collections in the Carolinas and in private collections in this country and abroad. She has sold her work professionally for almost twenty-five years. She received national recognition in 1998 by having a painting included in the “Arts for the Parks Top 200.”