Paint Annapolis is on the way! Learn more about the juried artists and get yourself ready for this historic Plein air painting festival.
We’re excited to welcome Rokhaya Waring from Clyde, North Carolina as a juried artist for Paint Annapolis 2023! Rokhaya often compares her painting process to cooking and gardening- where colors, flavors, and textures combine intuitively for her.
Rokhaya is the daughter of a French mother and an American father, with her dual nationality and extensive travels between Europe and the United States there is a profound influence on her artwork. Before moving to the USA, she lived in Florence and Paris, each for a year. When her family finally settled in Rockport, Massachusetts in 1972 they founded La Petite Ecole- now the Waring School.
Rokhaya’s personal memories of school in her childhood were her being homeschooled where she was printing on an antique letterpress, raising and milking goats, baking bread, playing the piano and violin, sketching from life, camping across America all with a pencil in hand. She says ever since she’s been able to hold a pencil, she has been drawing.
Waring graduated from Princeton University in 1988 with BA in Art History/Visual Arts and spent her first summer out of college painting in the Provencal village of Forcalquier. After Forcalquier being her main “inexhaustible” inspiration for twenty years, she returned to Massachusetts- a return to the Cape Ann of her childhood- and seascapes became her focus.
Her love for nature, travel, and plein air painting is deeply rooted in Rokhaya. So it’s no surprise that in the spring of 2021, she sold her house in Gloucester to move into a vintage Safari Trek motorhome and headed south to explore and find a new home to inspire her work. She, her husband, and her dogs now enjoy the spectacular view of the Blue Ridge Mountains from their deck in Clyde, North Carolina.
Waring has exhibited in dozens of solo, group, invitational and juried shows in the U.S. and France, and has garnered many awards. She is a member of Oil Painters of America, the American Impressionist Society, North Shore Arts Association, the Copley Society (1995-2008), Rocky Neck Art Colony, and has shown at the Salon Des Artistes Français, and the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and at the Currier Museum of Art. Her commissioned oil paintings are featured on Tru Fragrance & Beauty’s line of products. Waring is featured in “100 Artists of New England” (Schiffer 2011) and in “The American Flag in Contemporary Art”, (Schiffer, 2015). Notable collectors include: Carl Crossman (art dealer and appraiser for Antiques Roadshow); Todd Park (US Chief Technology Officer under Obama); Andre Agassi; and Brooke Shield
Learn more about Rokhaya on her website here.
Maryland Federation of Art Blog 