FINE LIFESTYLES - Fall, 2015
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TREND - Summer 2013![]() |
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AMERICAN ART COLLECTOR - April 2010
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DAILY INDEPENDENT
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![]() By Jean McKig On Art / The Desert Sun Sunday, November 19, 2000 The subject of Kat Sawyer's paintings at the George Shaffer Fine Art gallery at The Art Place seems to be anchored in recognizable reality, a forest glen, a nightscape, moments of nature captured in the freeze frame of the moment. One can envision being in these scenes that tug at the memory. But after viewing them, it is apparent that the paintings are more metaphorical interpretations of nature, the stuff of dreams. Sawyer's ability to transport the viewer into another, more spiritual realm is considerable. She has returned the romantic tradition of landscape painting to its rightful place and made a love for the sublime acceptable. Nature has always offered Sawyer her greatest challenges and her most profound sanctuary. She has climbed mountains and jumped off of them. She has slept under the stars and crawled under the earth. She's cavorted with dolphins and collected cowrie shells at a hundred feet below. For Sawyer, painting "en plein-air" is another way to touch the heart of nature, dodging insects and avoiding rattlesnakes in a quest for that fleeting amber moment when mountain tops blush salmon and the oak glows from within. Weathering wind and haze and heat to capture the light on an elusive eucalyptus tree in a field of poppies, standing ankle-deep in fresh powder snow while frozen fingers try to communicate the majesty of the High Sierra morning are commonplace experiences for the artist. Driven by her love of nature, Sawyer offers this quote from Jon Muir as her personal mantra, "One touch of nature makes all the world kin." Painting on-site, as plein-air denotes, fixes the moment with its particular light and captures forever a scene never to be repeated in the same exact way. Sawyer does not suffer from her relationship with landscape, dealing with its mannered way. She painstakingly exerts her art upon it chronicling all its fullness and the light-filled fragrances of the outdoors. The reality only constitutes a point of departure where Sawyer can satisfy her desire to delve deeper and enclose the subject in a magic circle, exalting its emotional accents. In her work, Sawyer uses her artistic expression to unite her search for enlightenment and the need to communicate in a body of work that surpasses the confines of direct experience. At times with confidently brushed blotches, she seems to assign an evocative role to color, a role of transfiguration in which she takes the most fascinating notes from color and in a serene manner infuses the spirit of her landscapes with a feeling of enchanted mystery. In some of her canvases, her brushstrokes produce fuzzy edges that blur the reality with a gentle tile of perspective that lifts the viewer above the horizon it seems as thought the viewer has the perspective of a low flying bird. Her work invites the viewer into the scene and makes viewing a personal experience. Everything in these landscape paintings is specific enough for the attention but sufficiently vague enough to raise the question of where it is and what it means, a question answered only by experiencing Sawyer's work.Jean Mckig is a free-lance writer based in Pinyon Crest. |