This month’s emerging artist show features the work of Sarah Rose, a UNM Graduate student and Chroma Studios artist. In addition to Sarah’s amazing oil paintings we have oil pastels by Astara Mills, photography by Justin Simenson, and a graphite drawing by Bryan Beck.
Along with the emerging artists, you will find the incredible work of last month’s featured artist, David Lloyd Stewart, who will show his work at Chroma for another month. I am happy to announce a new Chroma Studios artist, Spring Griffin, and her nostalgic acrylic paintings done on stretched vintage bed linens. Last but definitely not least, Raine Klover has brought us some of her new encaustic pieces.
The Clearing, Oil on board, raccoon, Sarah Rose
Sarah’s statement;
My painting has consistently exemplified my experience as friend and observer of various canine species which have inhabited my immediate natural surroundings where I have lived, both within the US and abroad. My environments have persistently been in a state of gradual decay due to human impact. In the extinct palm forests in the desert of Northern Bahrain; the rural Mississippi woodland; and in the Gila National Forest, I witnessed how feral dogs, coyotes, and wolves adapt to and suffer from disruptive human development. These disordered backdrops of afflicted desert and forest have heavily influenced my painting. As I walked with feral desert dogs, or tracked and observed coyotes and wolves, I collect imagery and decayed animal remains from the crumbling landscape and bring them back to my studio.
My living canine subjects usually appear in my work indirectly in the form of an alter-ego as I “ingest” my scavenged findings into oil painting compositions and mixed media pieces.
The focus of my current body of work is the amalgamation of paintings and sculptural representation by applying visual installation methods as used in natural history museum dioramas. I find that the combination of both two and three-dimensional pieces in an interpretive tableau is an effective response to my continuing canine-habitat experiences because I appreciate the notion that nothing in nature originates in isolation, but instead comes out of complex interrelationships. My subjects become myth-like as I display them in this fashion, particularly when my emotional interpretations are presented as scientific specimens, and this allows me to inject alternate meaning and anthropomorphism into my scavenged animal remains while uniting them with my paintings under a unanimous broader meaning, such as a conservationist’s perspective.
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