Debbie Callahan was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana and from an early age showed interest in painting and drawing. In recent years she has worked primarily in chalk pastel, acrylic paint, and watercolor, doing mostly figurative and still life paintings. She paints traditional subject matter in an untraditional way. Her lines are often hazy, colors muted and forms simplified. The colors often run into each other. Debbie’s compositions are rarely complicated; she prefers to keep the focus directed on the subject without many distractions in the painting. She tries to integrate these components into a cohesive painting.
To Debbie, artists are born, not created. She has always known she was an artist. She believes, in many ways, an artist’s skills are self-taught. A formal art education can teach us many things about the process but only by having awareness and listening to our own voices can we develop our own unique style of expressing ourselves.
She has studied with many accomplished artists, including James Hempel, Terry Stanley, Joy Moon and Fred Bell. Debbie has been inspired by many artists who have come before her: Odilon Redon, Marc Chagall, John Singer Sargent, Alice Neel, Lucien Freud, and Louise Bourgeois.
Debbie has exhibited widely, received several awards, and her work has been included in numerous exhibit periodicals and catalogues. One of Debbie’s pieces, Madonna & Child, was chosen from over 100 submissions to be featured on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Christmas Day 2012 as the “Gift of Art” to Wisconsin from the publishers.
She is self-represented in her own gallery, The Martini Girls Studio, and is currently working on creating art journals, watercolors on hand made papers, as well as curating and producing group art exhibits. Debbie is active in several art organizations and related activities. She hopes to continue to have an awareness of her inner voice and an expression of it in her paintings.