Christine Lafuente: ...The painter must look at the chaotic, muddy foreground below a transcendent sky, must look at the shadowy wall behind a lit bouquet of flowers. As soon as the focus shifts, it is tempting to make the painting all about the muddy ground or all about the dirty wall. Painting from nature is an opportunity to see poetically in a way that a camera cannot. Painting takes time. And in that space of time nothing is still. When I decide on a composition, it is usually in the middle of the process rather than the beginning. In a way, the later the better and before the brush touches the canvas. I spend time looking, mixing, I might do a drawing, I’m adjusting tones, I’m gathering materials, but mostly I am being with the thing I see for a long exposure and allowing it to reveal a composition.

Click the image on the right to continue reading

Gross McCleaf Gallery is delighted to present In Visibility, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Christine Lafuente. Known for her nuanced handling of oil color relationships and layered, reflective surfaces, Lafuente brings together still lifes, seascapes, and cityscapes in a body of work that explores how we see and remember.

The experience of looking is dynamic, with memory filling in gaps and fleeting details taking on a life of their own in the mind’s eye. Lafuente translates the fluidity of these perceptual conditions into paint, transcribing light and atmosphere through color to produce compositions that resolve these shifting conditions into their own visual truth.

It is a “harmonic resonance between light and color,” that determines each composition, as Lafuente describes. Her paintings are built through closely tuned color relationships, where variations of tone and saturation carry structure in place of fixed form...