What’s my medium? LIFE.
My life is my art form. I attribute my artistic passion to my mother and to Waldorf Education.

Meticulous Portrait Artist Shifts Into Expressive Genre
“It happened spontaneously”, says Veta McFall, an artist in Ann Arbor . “I had a sudden urge to paint differently.” McFall had spent the last 12 years painting very dramatic, meticulous, black and white portraits of People and Animals. Working as a professional artist majority of her life, McFall found herself wondering, “Is this what I am supposed to be doing?” That night, McFall began painting with her bare hands on a huge canvas. This time she wasn’t confined to her brand of Black and White Portraits, and it was an explosion of color. “I couldn’t stop. It felt so good”
McFall painted 5 paintings and titled each of them with a NUMBER. Thus began the “1985 SERIES”, named after McFall’s birth year. “My Vision for ‘THE 1985 SERIES’, is 100 completed pieces hanging across huge warehouse walls, and the project, per se, is a visual representation of the year-long Evolution of a Person”.

Each painting’s title is the number order in which they were finished. “I want the abstract painting to allow the viewer to create their own title and meaning. Whatever they see or feel, that’s it. I didn’t want to force “Sunsets” and “Landscapes” on people” she explains.

In her new genre of colorful, abstract painting, McFall works with her hands, not tiny paint brushes, as she did before. She is intentionally challenging herself to not expect an outcome or have control, but rather, being “entertained” by how it emerges in front of her. “It’s like a birth, I don’t control what is born, and I am genuinely excited to see how it turns out! I’m so entertained! I’m never bored!”
Aside from commissions, McFall taught at the Rudolf Steiner High School in Ann Arbor, a Waldorf School, and Adult Art Classes.

“For 12 years, teaching felt like the brightest hours of my week. I thrived on all of it. A year ago, I found myself feeling different. I decided to follow my intuition, retired from teaching, and put a hold on accepting commissions. I wanted to develop a new “genre” of my art. I didn’t know what, I just knew I wanted to feel passionate.”
“When I started painting like this, I thought “This feels right. I’m going to follow it”. I started having awareness of how I felt physically, while painting. I had never understood people when they said they have feelings or paint therapeutically.” Veta felt precision, execution, orders, pleasing the client, stress from procrastination, and so on. “When I realized that, I thought, ‘that’s not a fun way to live!’ What better way to “feel” my art than to just feel the paint with my bare hands?”

She had a confession: “My ego wanted to show off the technical skills, not my finger painting. Somehow it felt important to me. I committed to challenge my ego to let that go, and thought to myself “I’m not painting this for anyone. No one has to like it. No one has to buy it. Just paint” This certainly drew in her audience even more, with countless inquiries about purchasing. But McFall isn’t selling…yet.
McFall plans for an OCT 2025 Exhibit/Reception in Ann Arbor, with the full 100 piece “1985 SERIES”. Guests can view and purchase the original art work. Her IG reels show the process of creating each piece, and it seems more and more of McFall’s personality is coming through in the videos. Her biggest fans are her younger children, who frequently visit her art studio. “I love when their little heads make it into the videos. They give me the most genuine compliments.”