"Winter Landscape," watercolor by Vickie Ebbers.

Vickie Ebbers subtractive technique creates watercolors that are filled with atmosphere and elegance.

Vickie Bailey Ebbers says she's still trying to find a place to fit in. But this Hilton Head painter has found a niche among her peers, one that she finds more than a little daunting.

More information Vickie Bailey Ebbers' work can be seen daily at East End Gallery, 507 E. River St., Savannah, (912) 233-9244. Ebbers is in the gallery every Tuesday.

Ebbers' "Rose, Nude," earned the Past President's Award in the recent Watercolor Society of South Carolina 24th Annual Exhibition, now on display in Hilton Head's Coastal Discovery Museum.

"It's kinda embarrassing for me," Ebbers said. "I was sitting there at the awards program, sitting among artists I really admired, wishing it would get over with."

Ebbers should probably just sit back and begin to enjoy the ride.

Clearly accomplished as an artist - watercolor, pastel, pencil, charcoal - Ebbers' deft hand can render a detailed pencil drawing of a New Mexico village with the best of them. Or she can loosen up and create a Lowcountry pastel that drips with lush foliage and flowing blue skies.

But before you learn about her myriad skills and creativity as an artist, you must also know about Ebbers' determination and tenacity.

When her father died in Ebbers' late teens, she went to work in the linen mills of Lancaster, S.C., to help keep the family afloat.

"He died just as all my friends were going off to college," Ebbers recalls. "I was the youngest and couldn't go off and leave my mother. We had lost everything, so I went to work in the mill."

Ebbers recalls that arduous six months. Other women, entrenched in the piecework quotas of that industry, frequently snatched sheets from the young folder's hands and glared at her.

"I was just folding and looking around," Ebbers recalled. "I knew I couldn't do this."

But with some money in the bank, she enrolled in beauty school, emerging a year later with a license to cut, color and curl hair for a living.

"And I loved it," Ebbers said. Still, a childhood fascination with art kept nagging at her.

Night school was the answer for Ebbers.

"I first started taking art classes," Ebbers said. "But I soon realized I wasn't that many hours away from getting a full degree, so I kept going."

Ebbers cut hair by day and studied at night. The last three years of school, she sold her salon and a clothing store and went to school full-time, ultimately earning her degree from Winthrop College in Rock Hill, S.C., in 1996.

The more than 20-year career that "fed me and paid for college" was over, allowing Ebbers to focus her attention on school and her passion - interpreting the human figure.

You see, for every landscape or highly detailed pencil drawing of a building, Ebbers has a figural piece in the works.

"I like to paint the figure best," Ebbers says. "The nude is the most serious of all subjects and is an art form in itself. It is endless in terms of composition and expression."

Ebbers sees the nude with a classic eye. The images are evocative, yet subdued. Artistically composed and alluring, Ebbers' nudes are enhanced by her subtractive method of painting.

"Rose, Nude," was an award winner in teh Watercolor Society of South Carolina 24th Annual Exhibition.

Solid fields of color are laid down on a foundation of gesso on watercolor paper. When the surface has fully dried, Ebbers goes back into the sheet of color, slowly, carefully, painstakingly using a damp brush or moistened cotton cloth to remove color and allow the base to show through. Working really to create values in negative space, the results are images filled with atmosphere, mood and a powerful display of monochromatic color that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with positive application of watercolor.

But Ebbers doesn't limit the technique to just her beloved nudes. Landscapes take on an ethereal quality and the method creates subtle, shaded depth to the roundness of tree trunks and wandering country lanes.

But, the artist's insecurity always comes to the surface.

"The majority of my work has been for shows," Ebbers laments, "not for the public. Thank God I don't have to make a living at this.

"Pencil, pastel, watercolor, acrylic, charcoal, I'm all over the place. I'm not where I need to be yet."

But others, from painting show judges to peers, feel Ebbers' star is rising. "Her work is just so elegant," says Sandy Branam, a long-time member of the East End Gallery cooperative where Ebbers now shows and sells her work. "I've never seen anybody do some of the interesting kinds of things she's done. I think her nudes are great, but the expressiveness of what she does with landscapes and trees is just stunning.

"Its very evocative type of stuff - it goes beyond realism and reaches more to the depths of the soul."