About + CONTACT

My en plein air paintings can be found at the Simpatico Galleries in Charleston, SC and Boston, MA.

Commissions and other inquiries: hi@giselleharrington.com

About commissions: I regularly accept commissions for portraits of people, houses and landscapes. I also take on the occasional book cover illustration project. If you have a project in mind, feel free to call or email to discuss it further. I welcomes your questions!

Follow me on my Instagram and blog (coming soon!) for updates on workshops, where I am currently painting, tips on framing and presenting artwork, and more.

About my work:

I am an en plein air watercolor painter and visual journalist. Most of my painting is done directly from life. I am interested in regional cultures and the unique characteristics of specific places, and I explore areas I come across on trips or near where I am currently living.

My story:

In college in Hartford, CT I decided not to study art because it was too personal to me, and I wanted to use the time to try everything else. I studied chemistry, calculus, archaeology and double majored in History and Middle Eastern Studies with a minor in Arabic… My interests were broad but not very sustained, and my GPA definitely suffered! After college I arranged a trip to the West Bank of Palestine and Egypt for a few months each, volunteering. When I returned to the States I spent a few years in New York City, first working for Catholic Charities Office of Refugee Resettlement and then working for a non profit supportive housing agency that provided housing and support services for New York City’s homeless. At that time, though I was very interested in and moved by the stories of the people I met through these experiences, I started to realize that the only thing I was really passionate about doing was recording through my art what I heard and saw in the world around me. It seemed to me that the best idea to start out, in a business sense, would be to work from home as a freelance illustrator.

I moved to Charleston, SC where my sister and grandparents were, and stayed for a couple years, honing my skills and taking some commissioned work. My grandmother had grown up in Charleston, and though she and my grandfather bought a farm in Western Massachusetts, near where I live now, she had her childhood home on Tradd Street in Charleston, and she and my grandfather returned there later in life.

In 2016 I decided to pursue my MFA in illustration, got into the School of Visual Arts, and went back to New York City. In graduate school I benefitted from getting an inside look into the illustration world in a city known for art and design, from world-acclaimed illustrators who were visiting lecturers and faculty members of the program. I learned a lot about what I didn’t like about the visual arts world, and also how to create my own business path. 

I also supplemented my classes with a watercolor painting class at the Art Students League of New York with Timothy Clark, and a figure drawing class at the School of Visual Arts with Stephen Gaffney, the two best art classes I have ever taken.

Between graduation in 2018 and 2025 I have gone back and forth between Western Massachusetts, where several of my family members now live, and Charleston (with a short stint in Salem, MA) teaching painting and drawing classes in both places and working on commissioned projects. Starting around 2019 I increasingly spent the majority of my time going out and painting in watercolor from life, looking for scenes that seemed to tell the true story of a particular region. I put on my first show of en plein air paintings in 2019 at a brewery in Shelburne Falls, MA.

Today, though I still accept commissioned illustration work and teach, I paint from life almost every day and have been accepted into several competitive watercolor and en plein air shows. I signed with Simpatico Gallery in Charleston, SC earlier this year and am now working on building a series of paintings for Simpatico Gallery in Boston.

In 2025 I bought a house in Western Massachusetts, which I am in the process of renovating. Up until now with a few brief and expensive exceptions, I have always worked out of tiny apartments, so that painting small and medium-scale watercolors outside has been more convenient for me than other methods of image-making. With my new home and studio, I hope to turn my many watercolor “notes” taken on the road into larger paintings that tell the stories of different regions as new, fuller finished pieces.