Connie Cronenwett
Outside . . . Over There

September 5 – October 14, 2017

Opening Reception:
Friday, September 8, 2017, 7 – 9 pm

Artist’s Statement :

As a landscape painter, I am always on the lookout for potential subject matter. Sometimes a Michigan landscape will be so arresting that I’m forced to pull the car over and take photos. Other times, I’ll search along the rivers, creeks and lakes around my home, or along Lake Michigan’s shorelines, for a scene that has especially good light and shadow. In addition to the kind of scene we all find dramatic or lovely, rural beauty has a poignancy and pull . . . so much of the countryside I grew up with is disappearing. Painting gives me the opportunity to really look, and soak it in.
 
About pastels – is this a drawing media or a painting media? It is dry, but colorful, able to be built up in layers, allowing richness of color and texture. Pastels are the grown-up versions of our childhood ‘chalk’. Pure pigment is mixed with a colorless binder to form sticks of color ranging from thin and hard to buttery soft. I use either a 400 grit textured pastel paper, or apply a pastel ground to an archival substrate for a more textured surface on which to work.
 
I’m happiest with a finished landscape when it evokes the particular sense of the place – that ineffable response we have to nature’s spirit.
 
As the observer views the painting, the cycle from nature, to artist, to observer, and back to nature, is completed.
 
These images are of Michigan and of Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies.

— Connie Cronenwett

 

Selected work by other artists
showing in this exhibition

Selected work from our WSG owner/artists, and the following visiting artists:

Carol Hanna, Yvonne Pappas, Helen Gotlib, Jill Stefani Wagner, Marlee Hoffman, Idelle Hammond-Sass, Maria Ruggiero, Martha Rock Keller, Carlye Crisler, Marsha Rae Wright