Noted wildlife artist Libby Berry, a long-time islander who lives just north of Greenbank, will exhibit her work this weekend in her first one-woman show on Whidbey Island.

Berry has been a professional artist and teacher for nearly 25 years. She recently embarked on a new body of painting, much of which she will show at the Bayview Gallery exhibit, in addition to a retrospective of her work.

Along with her prominence as an artist, Berry earned a reputation for her innovative approach to art instruction. She has taught close to 300 students in venues as far apart as Florida and California, as well as at her New Renaissance Academy, based in her Lagoon Point home.

“I studied the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci, and discovered a body of knowledge there, of balance and flows, shadow and light, distance and nearness, color and density,” Berry said. “They go together in couplets. I actually sat down and wrote it down in the late 1970s.”

These “attributes of sight,” she says, “weave the fabric of the painting.” Once a painter understands these concepts, he or she can paint anything.

“There’s nothing you can’t duplicate on canvas,” Berry said. “Knowing the technology about how you create affects what you create.”

Berry earned an art degree from Marietta College in Ohio. She learned the basics there, she said, but it wasn’t until later — after study and travel abroad to the major art centers of Europe — that she absorbed the complete body of knowledge she integrates in her art and her teaching.

“I teach the foundation, the fundamentals of painting,” she said. “Then the students use them to do their individual work.”

Berry’s art leans toward realism, she said, and until recently has been primarily wildlife art.

“But it was an accident,” she said. “I just loved animals, and would go to wildlife art shows. I found it was an incredible field.”

Her subjects have included horses, lions, tigers, cougars, mountain lions, an ocelot, a life-size cheetah, mostly commissioned by collectors on the East Coast and in the Southwest, in Germany, Italy and Canada. The International Sheep Hunters Association commissioned a series of wild sheep of the world.

“It was called ‘In Search of Ewe,'” Berry laughed.

Berry will show many of her wildlife paintings, some on loan from the owners and others for sale, at her exhibit this weekend, which she calls “In the Spirit of the Northwest.”

“Lately I’ve been painting more landscapes and portraits,” she said. “I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I’m hoping to have a portrait of a well-known South Whidbey personality ready for the show.”

The central work will be a large 3- by 5-foot painting of an orca whale, leaping out of the water. It’s called “Having a Whale of a Time,” and serves as the signature piece of the exhibit. Other paintings will include a Cascades waterfall, a Lake Crescent landscape, a white rhinoceros, and a painting of Secretariat called “Running Free.” Berry has also borrowed from its owner her first painting, a life-size cheetah, that is 4 feet tall.

“There will be at least six original paintings for sale, and several prints,” Berry said. “And I’ll be showing some work in progress. I’m having the show so people can see what I’ve been doing.”

Berry plans to begin teaching another intensive art course this fall. The seven-week class is not just a painting school, she said.

“People from their 20s to their 40s and at all different levels come together and do art,” she said. “I’ve taught students who have never done a painting before, and at the end they have a work to be proud of.”