Meet Your Photographic Artist: CharMaine Beleele

CharMaine Beleele grew up in her father's Los Angeles art studio and art has always been a part of her life. With both her BA and her MA degrees in Communication and Theatre Arts, she teaches Communication classes at the University of Arkansas. She is also a business owner. Her photography studio specializes in portraits and weddings and her studio has existed in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the old family home, for 10 years. However, recently she has discovered the world is her studio, because her website has allowed her to travel all over the United States and Mexico to create photography for her clients.

Her work includes special events, weddings, commercial work, and portraits. Her digitally enhanced photo-paintings as well as her photo-journalism will be on display at the Performing Arts Center Gallery of Alma, this summer for the third consecutive year. She has realized her true and first best creative destiny has been found in her camera work, as she and her husband, who is also her shooting partner, give photojounalistic as well as portrait coverage to special events and people everywhere.

CharMaine uses her lively communication background, her innate artistic ability, her writer's storytelling talent, and her most importantly, her photographic training to help people capture the times when they "Dream, Laugh, Share and Celebrate." Feel free to discuss your upcoming special event, wedding or portrait package by contacting her at photoangels@sbcglobal.net or telephone her at 479-782-9573 or her cell phone at 479-629-8936. Folks in her hometown are often surprised to see that she writes from one to three articles per month for the well know professional, international photography magazine, The Rangefinder.

One of the crown jewels of her year is to photograph the world class photographers who win the "academy awards" of photography competition in Las Vegas annually. The magazine is headquartered in Santa Monica, not far from where she grew up as a child, but email and reasonable flight tickets enable her to live where she wants and still cover the photography stories of the world's most famous photographers, and the latest trends in creative imaging. She treasures her speech teaching and she says she does not understand how a person can be a good photographer without being a good communicator.

Her background previous to the last seven years at University of Arkansas position, included 20 years as a full time tenured professor of Speech and Theatre Arts at Rose State College, where she directed two to three theatre productions per year. This communication teaching matched with her photography skills, enabled her to teach the importance of communication skills in the photographic business. The workshops, under the "Super Monday" PPA program for photographers, attracted professional photographers from several states. She also explores this theme in a yearly program for the Northwest Arkansas Art Teachers' Association. For her hobbies, she has always loved arts and crafts, a love instilled in her by her mother, Regina Chase, an authentic primitive apple head doll crafter on the nationally famed War Eagle circuit for many years.

This is why she teaches "Snap and Scrap," at a local art store. In this course, she teaches her students, regardless of their camera type, how to improve their amateur photography skills. She also teaches them the elements of art and design and shows them how to create elegant scrap books with the photographs. Class field trips enhance the course and it is also offered to civic groups, in a short workshop version. She looks to taking this program for improving basic photography, out of the state, to civic groups and scrap booking or clubs everywhere.

As an artist, CharMaine has experimented in many mediums, such as watercolor, oil paint, acrylic paint, ink, clay and wood, and she has shared these mediums with the children of Arkansas for the last four years in the Crawford County Art Center summer volunteer art program. Please check back often for more beautiful "Angel Kissed Images."