Artist's Statement

The quiet and the familiar are the subjects of my painting expression. I must have a love connection.  Although I find that connection in my travels to Monet’s Garden in Giverny, France, the countryside of the Netherlands, and Cape Town, South Africa, the California Missions and Adobes, I always come back to the land of my ancestors, Kansas.

Artist's Background

Doloris J. Pederson is an internationally recognized painter active in the arts for over 50 years as artist, art instructor, and art collector.  She sets up her easel to paint in oils and watercolor, whether it is in the center of Amsterdam or the countryside of Kansas.  

“My roots are deep in Kansas. My parents were the first generation of Europeans to be born in Kansas.  My mother Rosa Laberto was an Italian orphan on one of the Orphan Trains that brought her to midwest Kansas from New York in in 1903, where she was adopted by a Topeka family. My father Peter Pfeifer returned from World War I in 1920, eager to build his American Dream - a farm of his own with his new bride Rosa. I am a true ‘Native Daughter’ of the Kansas Prairie.  It is part of my soul. I grew up on that first farm where my parents raised their 17 children from 1920 to 1973. The silence of early morning, the sounds of the farm animals, and my brothers and sisters became my familiar.  Because of the age span of my siblings, there were never more than at 10 at home at a given time.”

After residing in Southern California from 1970 to 2008, Doloris returned to Kansas to paint the indigenous countryside she has loved since childhood.

In addition to a BS in Fine Art from Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas, Doloris has attended classes at University of California, Los Angeles; California Art Institute, Westlake Village, California; California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, California; and The Scottsdale Artists’ School, Scottsdale, Arizona. She has studied with Joyce Pike, Ted Goershner, and Marilyn Simandle, all Master Signature members of OPA, and with John O. Encinias. 

Doloris’s artistic heroes are Andrew Wyeth, John Singer Sargent, and the Russian master Nicolai Fechin.  She is a juried member of Oil Painters of America and the California Art Club.

More information is available at DolorisPederson.com.