Making a Painting

Start with inspiration and then just paint

Building up layers

Secret Forest 1 & 2

Making a Painting

Cheryl has moved beyond her earlier photorealist style to a more courageous approach that is part "serendipity and happenstance" and very much about the process of exploring media and aggressively moving paint and color around, while still maintaining artistic control. In her current works are she has been drawn to the raw beauty of nature as she creates this impressive landscape series.

In recent years, Cheryl has simplified the landscape to symbolic depictions of isolated forests, foliage, or a group of trees. Drawing her inspiration from her walks in a near by forest, Cheryl began this series actually in the forest. She sketched colored areas with pastels and quick washes and then moved into her studio to aggressively begin applying paint to panel.

These two works are Secret Forest 1 and 2 painted on birch panels. Each are 4'x4' square. A unique diptych or singularly strong individual pieces. She laid in fields and sky in overlapping layers and applied freely texture and solid colours in brilliant hues. These large-scale diptychs capture a non-specific essence of geography and glow with the technical and stylistic assurance of a mature painter.

Applying layers and skeins of both soft hue and bright colors she balances her work with a ballast of dark area in the bottom while the top areas are lighter and brighter. Her work is infused with energy. Her paintings breathe and move becoming a tangle of pale pink, scarlet, mustard, sienna, yellow ochre and deep red hues. Lines move and suggest that this ganglion of pigments evokes the nerves or arteries of this secret forest. Cheryl works deliberately.

I create and then I step back and ponder, that is my favorite time when I am not the painter, photographer or sculptor, but the viewer. Eventually, the work tells me what to do next.

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