Oil painter Hilarie Lambert will tell you she enjoys painting the familiar: vintage toys, notable architecture, or coastal scenes, but nothing about her work is “ordinary.” Through the filter of light in an egret’s wings in flight, or the way a newspaper crumbles under just-caught blue crabs, Lambert reveals the beauty in what we might have forgotten or gotten too busy to notice – the magic of the every day.

Although Lambert has won numerous awards, what keeps her painting is not the life outside the studio, but the life inside it. “I just want to be the best painter I can be,” she says, and she means it, painting prolifically and covering subjects as diverse as she. Recently, she has focused on her figurative work and now accepts commissions, a challenge she enjoys.

The world in Lambert’s paintings is seen through her sense of humor and love of whimsy. She paints the rainy day in Paris, not the sunny one, the forgotten radio on the shelf, or the boy feeding pigeons in St. Mark’s Square (instead of the majestic basilica), all illustrating her joy in the edges of things, the side streets, the back doors. The paint is laid down in what seems to be quick, loose, but strong brush strokes usually with a very generous amount of paint. This style gives the viewer a definite sense of the artist’s hand and vision at work in the finished piece, and deepens the feeling of connection between subject and artist.

A former graphic designer, and illustrator, Ms. Lambert has studied under Burton Silverman, Kim English, Scott Burdick, and Judy Carducci. She travels extensively in Italy and France, where she paints and visits family. She lives in Charleston, S.C. with her husband John, and has two children – Casey, a brewmaster in Tampa, and Samantha, a fashion stylist in Paris.