Brief Biography:

 

Tara Shoemaker is a Rhode Island-based artist working in watercolor and mixed media. Inspired by the landscapes of both New England and her native Nebraska, she creates atmospheric paintings that explore light, weather, wonder, and the experience of place.

Working with watercolor, acrylic ink, graphite, charcoal, and mixed media, Shoemaker is less interested in documenting a landscape than in capturing what it feels like to encounter it. Her work is shaped by a belief that beauty is meaningful and that the natural world can reveal something beyond itself. Through expressive color, atmosphere, and abstraction, she creates landscapes that invite viewers to pause, pay attention, and rediscover a sense of wonder.

Shoemaker has exhibited with the Conanicut Island Art Association and the South County Art Association. She is a member of the South County Art Association and the Professional Artist Association. Her work is held in private collections in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Arkansas.

 

Extended Biography:

 

Tara Shoemaker is a Rhode Island-based artist working in watercolor and mixed media. Her paintings are rooted in a lifelong love of the landscape and the conviction that ordinary places can sometimes feel charged with meaning.

Shoemaker grew up in Nebraska, where much of her childhood was spent outdoors beneath expansive skies and ever-changing weather. Long summers, distant horizons, wildflowers, wind, and approaching storms shaped her earliest experiences of the natural world. She drew, painted, wrote poetry, and created artwork throughout childhood, though she rarely imagined art would become a central part of her life.

Although art remained a recurring presence, it was not until her mid-thirties that Shoemaker began pursuing painting seriously. What started with a watercolor kit and a trip to a local state park quickly became a disciplined practice of observation, study, and experimentation. As she developed her skills, painting changed the way she experienced the landscape itself, teaching her to notice the subtle shifts of light, atmosphere, and color that give a place its character.

Watercolor became her primary medium because of its unique balance of control and unpredictability. Its fluid nature allows colors to blend, separate, and interact in ways that cannot be entirely planned. Rather than resisting those qualities, Shoemaker embraces them. Watercolor, acrylic ink, graphite, charcoal, texture, and occasional touches of iridescence often find their way into her work, giving her the freedom to follow the needs of each painting rather than the boundaries of a particular medium.

Though her paintings begin with observation, they are not intended as records of specific places. Shoemaker is less interested in documenting a landscape than in capturing the experience of being there. A photograph can describe the shape of a tree or the outline of a distant hill. Painting offers another possibility: communicating the feeling of standing beneath a storm-filled sky, watching light move across a field, or encountering a place that feels larger than the sum of its visible parts.

Her years in Nebraska continue to shape her work, even as Rhode Island's forests, coastline, and changing seasons have become equally important sources of inspiration. The vast openness of the prairie taught her to love distance, weather, and sky. New England introduced her to a different kind of landscape—one defined by trees, shifting light, and intimate spaces. Together, these influences have contributed to a body of work that moves between observation and interpretation, balancing recognizable forms with expressive color, atmosphere, and abstraction.

Again and again, Shoemaker returns to moments when beauty breaks through the ordinary: sunlight emerging after a storm, light filtering through trees, clouds gathering on a distant horizon. She is drawn to these scenes because they embody a tension she encounters throughout the natural world. The landscape bears unmistakable signs of brokenness, yet it remains astonishingly beautiful. Her paintings grow out of that paradox. Rather than treating nature as scenery, she approaches it as a witness—something that points beyond itself and suggests that beauty is not incidental, but meaningful. Through color, atmosphere, and abstraction, she seeks to capture those moments when a familiar place suddenly feels charged with significance, when wonder interrupts routine, and when the landscape reminds us that brokenness is not the whole story.

Shoemaker has exhibited with the Conanicut Island Art Association and the South County Art Association and is a member of the South County Art Association and the Professional Artist Association. Her work is held in private collections in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Arkansas.