Lauren Cherry - Maine Seascapes

Maine Seascapes - oil on paper

"After being in a meditative state, I started these paintings at 3:30am by pre-mixing my palette. This enabled me to paint in a dark room in order to see true color and values. I painted the dark trees against the dark sky, feeling the rawness of nature. Sea and sky blended together to make one mass. I examined a timeless emptiness. I painted racing against time, each ray of light transforming my subject, every moment a hidden secret. I noticed that as the sun began to rise ‘sound’ occurred for the first time, as ‘wind’ arrived.

I am interested in the dream like quality that exists when edges are undifferentiated by lack of light. There is a whole new definition of 'value', black upon black, color within no color. Color is barely decipherable. My work explores landscape as memorial. As both a physical fact and repository for collective memory of the natural world, landscape becomes the portal through which the mind understands human existence. These paintings are the essence of a new day, a timeless sense of purity that is obscured in our waking hours, yet exists, even in this modern world, with every new dawn." Lauren Cherry