SHERI BAKES | WONDERLAND TRAIL
Tahoma Twilight, oil on canvas, 36 x 66 inches
Sheri Bakes | Wonderland Trail
March 2 - 25, 2023
Sheri Bakes has been painting the natural world with an ethereal intensity for more than 20 years. Her new collection of landscape paintings draws inspiration from a close friend's challenging circumnavigation of Mt. Rainier on the Wonderland Trail. Highly attuned to atmospheric conditions that border on the non-visual, such as fine mist in the air or thin veils of fog lifting in morning sun, Bakes seeks to represent subtle qualities of being alive and present in time and space.
With her characteristic blend of Pointillist abstraction and contemporary Impressionism, the artist brings a strong sense of movement to large portions of her canvases where kaleidoscopic fields sparkle and shine with color. In Bakes' deft portrayal, nature consists of both substance and feeling. As much as we see the alpine meadows with lupines in bloom, it is through the feeling of wind and the elements that we sense the full force of the artwork, as a refuge or place of stillness in the cacophony of modern existence.