Arleta Pech

Arleta Pech's striking watercolor paintings have received critical acclaim for their high contrast, unusually intense use of color and exquisite detail. Pech's ability to achieve both impact and delicacy in her paintings attests to her facility with her preferred medium — watercolor.

Born in the Midwest, Pech has lived in Colorado since 1960. Trained in fine art as a youth, she began her art career as a commercial artist. Pech returned to painting in the late 1970s when she continued her training in watercolors. Pech feels that the turning point of her career came in 1980 when she began to concentrate on floral subjects. At this time she began to receive recognition in local and regional shows and to receive awards for her art.

Watercolor is Pech's medium of choice because she feels that she can control it and use it to best create the effect of light on her subjects: "I'm painting the light on the flowers, not just the flowers themselves." Her goal, Pech says, "is to create beautiful images that glow with light and inspiration."
Her lavish flowers look real enough to pick, bathed in radiant light and surrounded by cascades of elegant white lace. When Arleta paints lace, she really only paints the holes — she doesn’t use any white paint. The only white seen in her paintings is the white of the paper!
Pech is represented by several galleries, and her work has been selected for numerous juried exhibitions and invitationals. She won the Colorado Watercolor Society Award in the 1986 Rocky Mountain National Watermedia Exhibition and a special award at the 1988 National Watercolor Society Western Art Invitational. She is a signature member of The Rocky Mountain National Watermedia Society, The NWS Western Invitational and was invited to participate in the 1996 Great Women Artists of America Show. She holds painting workshops for Mill Pond dealers and art organizations across the country. In 1977, The Artist Magazine invited her to join 10 of the top watercolor instructors for a special workshop, attended by 300 artists from around the world. Pech’s original paintings are included in many private and corporate collections, and her work has been featured in publications such as American Artist and The Artist Magazine. Her paintings were selected for a series of plates by The Bradford Exchange as well as jigsaw puzzles and posters. Her works are the subject of the book, Painting Fresh Flowers in Watercolor, published by North Light Books