Opening Reception: Vera Sprunt: Trace to Twilight

Vera Sprunt: Trace to Twilight
opening reception: Friday, August 16, 5-7 pm
on view: August 16–September 14, 2024

“Life or death, rising and falling, there is beauty in it all. Trace to Twilight encompasses a body of paintings and photographs where death and regeneration are inherent. Created over the past twelve years, each work is part of a larger whole or story. Fascinated by entropy, the works explore the beauty of the natural world growing, fading and falling apart. Always veracious, flowers play a leading role, presenting a certain eternal truth, testifying to the beautiful and ephemeral nature of flowers as well as their healing power for the soul.

All of the works are altered, whether traced over with paint or ratcheted up with vibrant color that embraces the surreal. My background as a lithographer is instrumental in the paintings’ technical layering of acrylic gouache and photographic information. Here botanical forms, rocks and exoskeletons of marine creatures are collected and staged into various psychological landscapes. Assembled into intricate circular compositions, rhyming painted forms trace over faded photographic information. This meticulous labor of brush stokes act as a visual meditation that circles back on itself. Weaving the figurative and abstract, the paintings portray a welcome respite, leading up to later works that escape into a vivid and hyperreal world.

These luminous landscapes address a recent visit to southern, childhood gardens of long ago. Here is a return to the past, a dream book beautifully evolved, a trace to twilight.”

– Vera Sprunt, August 2024