Fine art for sale

“I come from a life spent making music, moving energy through time and space to affect the emotions of the listener. My visual art seeks to convey this same motion of energy--using rhythm, silence, and expressive mark-making in harmony with the pastel medium's glorious palette of brilliant pure color--to conjure emotion in viewers and ask them deep questions about what they perceive in the art.

“When I discovered the medium of soft pastels, I was captivated by its dazzling intense colors and ability to go from whispering with rough sheer strokes to shouting with thick impasto gestures. In my work, I layer pastels in velvety powder, creamy stick, and harder pencil forms to achieve a variety of textures and expressive marks.”

Atlanta-based pastellist Paula Fagerberg originally hails from Boston, with some years spent along the way in Stockholm, Sweden. (In fact her business name, Fairhill Fine Art, comes from the translation of her Swedish surname.)

Paula’s art career has taken her from professional calligraphy to print publications design to visual facilitation: drawing large improvised infographics in real time at corporate meetings and events (including live-drawing celebrity talks for clients like Coca-Cola).

After spending many years doing mixed-media journaling, monoprinting, and collage art swaps with artist friends, Paula discovered the silky, velvety, magical medium that is soft pastel. Her first pastel paintings were accepted right away into the first juried show she ever applied to, and that validation of being on the right artistic path has led her to ravenous learning binges and excited explorations of what pastel can do. She can’t paint fast enough to keep up with all the ideas! 

Paula is a member of the Southeastern Pastel Society. While she holds a 16-month certificate in Advanced Graphic Design from Emory University, and has studied lettering arts with some of the world’s best-known calligraphers and typography designers, her main university education has been in music; she is a professional harpist who has toured all over the world with some of America’s finest early music ensembles, and now plays regularly for private events in Georgia.