Walking through her home, one can see that Barbara Hartz has a keen eye for beauty. Her keen eye is currently on display at Newtown Senior Center’s Senior Showcase through August.

Hartz has dabbled in oil painting, acrylic painting, stained glass, and now watercolor. She has always been artistically inclined — noting that at a young age she received a blackboard as a gift. Hartz’s art journey took off from there. Hartz said that she got engaged at 18, and as another gift, she was given an oil painting set.

“I didn’t know anything about oils or anything, but I got little canvasses … I just copied some animal pictures, of course, out of National Geographics,” Hartz said. “Then I got married, I had children, and I taught myself how to knit, crochet, do embroidery, sewing.”

While Hartz admitted that she liked the finished product of oils more, acrylic was easier to work with because it didn’t require the toxic chemicals. She compared oil paints to silks, and acrylics to polyester.

Hartz said more, “Watercolor is fun because if [you] used it with water, it’s kind of like stained glass, you know? It does its thing. It’s not necessarily what you put down — it’s going to change. So that part of it is really fun. I loved oils. I liked the finished product of oils. I always compared oil and acrylics, oils to silk, acrylics to polyester, because I felt the colors in oil is so rich and vibrant, and acrylic is synthetic. I really liked all the mediums when I was using them.”

Hartz explained that when she had her children, she stopped her creative work to do the “family thing,” as many women artists find themselves doing. Then, when she was 50, she decided she wanted to learn how to ride horses. She said she had always wanted to learn, so she stopped waiting and did it.

Hartz found herself in some odd jobs throughout the years, too. She said that she “horse sat,” which really meant taking care of a farm while the owners were in Puerto Rico during the winter. She has dog sat, worked at Guiding Eyes, sewed and mended clothes, and also worked at her friend’s embroidery store. In one way or another, Hartz was consistently involved in animal care, which shines through in her artwork.

On display now are some of her watercolors, pencil drawings, and one piece of stained glass. Some of the watercolors are commissions of pet portraits and some are her raw sparks of inspiration.

One picture that is on display is a pencil drawing of Cherry Grove Farm. Hartz explained that she starts with pencil drawings first, then transfers the drawings onto watercolor paper. For her pet portraits, she takes the photo and puts it on a transparent grid. Using the grid, Hartz can enlarge the photos to make a bigger portrait, or leave it a similar size for a smaller portrait. The pencil drawing on display was the first step in her landscape scene — the finished watercolor is still hanging in her home.

“I always start with the eyes,” Hartz said. “To me, that’s the painting.” In her progress photos of her paintings, one can see that she was not hyperbolizing. She has the faint outline in pencil, and goes straight for the eyes and builds from there. Her daughter calls them “ghost eyes.”

Hartz said that she enjoys watercolors because she can move around her house and work at her kitchen counter, because “the water is right there,” or in her dining room. She said that she also stands back and can look at each step as she does it.

While showing some artwork that was not on display, she explained more of her process. She showed a piece of art that had a Buddha face in it that she saw when she went to Thailand. She explained that when the Khmer Rouge invaded Thailand, they cut the heads of all the Buddhas off. She snapped a photo of one that had banyan trees growing around it. To create the painting, she wet the entire paper and dropped colors in. After the colors were in, she went back and created trees from the colors that were on the page. The entire painting was done in blues and purples, a color palette she finds herself working in often.

Hartz said that she “love[s] winter scenes,” and shared that cool colors are “her” colors. Her home reflects this, and there are blue necklaces and beads in the case at Newtown Senior Center that accent her artwork perfectly.

Hartz’s use of shadow and highlights in her watercolors is expertly crafted. As she focuses so much on the eyes, they all shine through in her paintings. An onlooker can feel the subject and get to know them by standing and looking at the work for just a few moments.

“In this day and age, there’s so much stress and upheaval,” Hartz said, a sentiment she shares with many other artists who have showed work at Newtown Senior Center. “I feel all the arts are really important for people … I feel it brings joy to people.

“I feel people need to cry joyful tears, and if something like art or music or theater or anything like that can bring out your emotions,” she trailed off. “So many times people stifle. They stifle their emotions. And that’s how I feel about art. I feel like it’s an emotion that I’m expressing on a piece of paper.”

Hartz invites all readers to feel and see her emotions expressed on paper at Newtown Senior Center. The showcase is in the entrance foyer and is open to the public during senior center hours.

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Reporter Sam Cross can be reached at sam@thebee.com.