Art Gallery

Elle Hopkins Fountain fell in love with the idea of painting long before she ever picked up a brush: "I was a kid, living with my family in New Hampshire, when I noticed – really noticed – the landscape for the first time. It was one of those quintessential fall days, with the light raking across unmown fields. The sky was a piercing blue, the trees were tricked out in their autumn splendor, and I was dazzled. I thought, 'Someday I’m going to paint all this.'"

She studied painting and drawing in college and began to work almost immediately in the business of television. There was a hierarchy to this: She began as "an extra pair of hands" delivering hot chocolate and coffee to the actors out in the fields on frigid exterior sets. She graduated to production assistant: "A lateral move, yes, but at least I had a title. I later became a props person and eventually a scenic artist."

Being a scenic artist requires a wide array of skills. One must know how to grain wood, hang wallpaper, do faux finishes, paint perspectives, paint on a huge scale, paint whatever the production demands on any given day. And do something entirely different the next day. Elle Hopkins Fountain's work as a scenic artist took her from Sesame Street to the Santa Fe Opera, from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood to the sets of George Romero horror films.

She paints in watercolor, in part due to the range the medium affords her. One can paint translucent washes and multiple glazes, or thick opaque color using just enough water to carry the pigment from the palette to the paper: "Watercolor offers the variety and challenge to keep me interested. It allows me to do something different every day."