Todd Voss: Featured artist at the Lakeville Art Festival
Todd Voss
Todd Voss first started doing art as a child, drawing the characters in his favorite comic books – Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Porky Pig, the whole gang.
He began getting serious about it – and considering art as a vocation – his senior year of high school.
“My last year of high school I took nothing but art classes – and, I think, one gym class,” he said. “I’ve been doing art since I was a little kid and I just never stopped.”
As the Best in Show winner as the 2011 Lakeville Art Festival, Voss will be the featured artist at this year’s festival, which runs Sept. 15-16 on the grounds of the Lakeville Area Arts Center.
Lakeville will be the final stop on Voss’ summer art fair schedule. A full-time professional artist, he averages about 10 such events throughout the Midwest each year, where he sells his oil paintings. Last weekend saw him at an art fair in central Wisconsin.
The real work – his painting – he does mostly at his home in Detroit Lakes, Minn.
He admits there isn’t much pingpong played in the basement rec room of his split-level home. His wife, Fern Belling, is also a painter, and the couple has converted the basement of their home into an art studio.
“Some people say two artists can’t live together, but we seem to get along fine,” he said.
Voss also does a lot of outdoor painting, picking a bucolic locale and doing a “field study” – a smaller painting with less detail than the works he produces at home. And he shoots a lot of photos during these outdoor sessions.
“I’ll then use the field study and the photos to make a larger painting in my home studio,” he said.
“In the Oaks Pasture” by Todd Voss
One thing influencing Voss’ artwork is his practice of transcendental meditation, or TM. It’s something he learned as a student at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, which he attended from 1986 to 1990.
“It’s a regular four-year college, but in addition to that it teaches TM and the science of consciousness, to connect the subjects you’re studying back to yourself,” he said.
“I still practice TM. I don’t consciously try and integrate things from TM and meditation into my painting, though meditation is bound to have an effect on whatever you do.”
To view samples of Voss’ work, visit www.mnartists.org/todd_voss.
