Pencil perfect

• It's all in the details for this artist

When she was in kindergarten, Linda Ferguson was compelled to color within the lines and draw the prettiest picture. By junior high, she sold her first piece of art.

But the only subjects that really interested her were horses, down to their smallest physical feature and the stitching on their tack.

No one else in her family was artistically inclined, but Ferguson realized early in her life that, "If I can see it, I can put it on paper."

Her medium of choice is pencil, although she does acrylic on rare occasion and pastels. She works mostly from photographs.

"I've always drawn, it's just a God-given gift," she said. "The pencil is handy and I find it is easier to manipulate. I like the pencil best, because of the eraser. With the detail drawing I do, it's necessary to try to be as exact as I can, so I need to erase or adjust. It certainly is my favorite, but I do other mediums."

She never planned to sell her work, but as she became an adult she realized her art was of the same quality of many others being sold.

"It's a different artistry," she said. "I am not creative. My love is to produce something very specific to the individual that means something to them. I don't just go home and draw. I rarely draw unless it is a commissioned piece of work."

Ferguson never studied art.

"I've been asked a couple of times why don't I teach," she said. "I tell them that I don't know anything about art."

She doesn't advertise her work and doesn't do shows.

"I don't know how to do those things," she said. "I'm very self-conscious about that."

She tried setting up a table at an event once, going with a friend who showed horses.

"That's not for me," she said. "But it was all right, because (her work was) seen and from there, it was word of mouth."

Ferguson moved from Fort Worth, Texas, to Ruidoso 19 years ago. She works for Ferguson Plumbing Supply, but is not related to the owner. She quickly became everyone's go-to consultant as she exercised the same methodical approach to sales as she does to her artwork.

Initially, she would use lunch hours to work on her art at a drafting table in her office.

"I would hang a picture or two at work and had an art table," she said. Customers would see her work there or while thumbing through a book of her pieces she left on her desk to keep "antsy" clients occupied while she filled out the paperwork on their orders.

"A lot of my customers are from Texas and they would tell their friends," she said.

With specific requests, she broadened her subject matter to portraits, race cars, vintage cars, dogs, cats, and objects that were meaningful to the person commissioning the work, such as a windmill or wagon.

But she isn't into landscapes or cluttered backgrounds. She prefers boiling a picture down to the subject.

"I call it getting rid of the background noise, eliminating all but the subject of the picture, having nothing in the background to distract from that," she said. "Now the subject is just the cowboy and his horse. It's more personal."

An average commission could take from four to six weeks.

"This year, it's been busy, nonstop," she said. "But it's a variety. I can do none or be busy the entire year. Because I don't go seek the work, if it comes along, it comes along. If it doesn't, I'm still happy. There is more time to ride my horse and motorcycle with my husband and do other things."

Again on average, a commission starts at about 30 hours of work. In a recent series depicting a customer's three daughters with their horses, the work really involved six portraits, she said.

Her choice of pencil now is a mechanical point 3 or point 5, although her favorite used to be an ebony art pencil with a very soft lead that could deliver from light to extreme dark tones.

"But mechanicals work best with their tiny lines," she said. "When I shade or shadow, I don't use my fingers or a blending smudge, just the pencil lead. I just work it and work it and work it."

She likes 80 pound paper with a medium tooth, and on rare occasions, a fine tooth. The tooth of a paper is the surface finish or feel of a paper, the roughness or smoothness, which will impact how well a medium grips onto the paper.

Ferguson draws from left to right to ensure that her hand is not on the picture.

"So it develops finished as I go along," she said.

The first time she posted a progression on her private Facebook, the response was "crazy" and now she regularly follows the development, ending with a "meet the subject" introduction when a drawing is finished.

"I have found when I visit with other artists, that is not the way they draw," Ferguson said. "We all do it our own way. As it develops, I'm excited too, because you start with a blank piece of paper and all of a sudden you have things there. I'm just as anxious to see what's happening as it develops."

When people ask her how big the portraits are, Ferguson said, "I say the right size."

"It's detail work. I use a magnifying glass to see the details and to draw when it gets to the fine details," she said. Her husband came up with that aid about 10 years ago when her ophthalmologist told the artist she had "terrorized" her eyes.

"I wished I had thought of that earlier," she said. "I can't believe I wasted all that time struggling to be so detailed without it."

Ferguson said she wants her work to look perfect up close as well as from a distance with every buckle, ring, stitch and strap in the right place. If a buyer is dissatisfied with a finished work, they are not obligated to buy and "everybody is happy," she said.

Over the years, she's displayed her work at the Oso Art Reserve in Capitan and the Dolan House in the Lincoln Historic District. The Hubbard Museum of the American West commissioned renditions of the wagons in the museum's collection and hung them for several months. She doesn't often run prints of her work, but has a few for sale.

Ferguson had hoped to pass along her artistic ability and her love of horses to her two children, but although both could be artistic, they followed other paths and neither is a horse enthusiast. In her downtime, Ferguson rides her quarterhorses Sienna and Durango, or motorcycles with her husband, Steve.

She can be contacted at  575-808-0687.