Enlightened and Reaching For the Sky

Enlightened and Reaching For the Sky

    “If I can share the beauty and what I feel inside about it to somebody else through my art, then that’s a success.”

-Sidney Sinclair

    

  In anticipation of a new year of art making, Boerne artist Sidney Sinclair needed to define and pinpoint a thematic essence she would channel into her paintings for her “Dyad” Exhibition with fellow artist Bill Scheidt.  Known for her traditional landscapes and abstract crosses, she pondered what direction she would take and had an epiphany about merging abstraction elements into her traditional landscapes, which became one of the unifying cruxes of her current body of work.  Sinclair clarifies, 

“I want to see if I can mix them a little bit…have some abstraction within some of the representational pieces.  I’m not sure how that’s going to work out until I get in there and try, but I’ve started.”  

The abstract painting Enlightened and the landscape Reaching for the Sky are two paintings that on the surface appear different in so many ways, but they are forged in tandem with emotive elements of color and composition that are used to impart to the viewer the extraordinariness of life.           

   

  Enlightened is an abstract cross painting that is a detour from her traditional color palette that she utilized previously, which inhabited a golden realm of celestial yellows and earthy tones with hint of other rainbow hues.  This painting enraptures one in the cooler spectrum of deep tones of violet and purple and swaths of intense magenta. The off center composition of the cross has a presence, with its textural fragments dissipating into the background and creating an ethereal ambiguity.  

There are metallic accents of gold that cause the eye to travel around the picture plane,

highlighting the defragmentation of this cross as its boundaries become less defined by the textural applications.   Regarding the different approaches to execution between abstract and traditional, “The piece takes over and it evolves into its own self and so, that part, you really can’t explain.”  

    

Reaching for the Sky, a landscape oil painted in early 2015, is in a traditional, representational style that depicts a peaceful embankment of trees and a river that is gently meandering through.  In this vertically oriented landscape, the sky is the main player in the composition, its dominating presence limitless, with clouds that are loftily present in the expanse of muted blues and subtle periwinkle.  They are levitating delicately, vibrating with warm yellows and subtle accents of rose pinks.  At once, one feels kinship with this peaceful drama and is drawn into the painting.  Gazing at the clouds one begins to see and feel the similarities between the two paintings.

     Unfettered, the clouds are columns of vaporous hues that reach skyward, reflecting the glory of the hidden sun.  Within Enlightened, there is an immediacy of an emotional eternity expressed by the dynamic vivid colors that are also omnipresent in the tranquil vista of Reaching for the Sky. 

 There is a diaphanous palette that is painted in a more intuitive manner within the clouds in Sinclair’s sky.  These clouds do not reflect the light of an objective reality, but more of the ramifications of the internal psyche; this is where the intersection of the ‘old and new’ has subtly dawned.  Even though Sinclair has just begun this new era of experimentation, the core tenet remains the same, despite the genre of the piece: 

“-Any kind of art that I do, I’m going to be expressing myself, what I see and feel that just surrounds me and hope that I can impart that to someone that’s looking at it.”

      

Genuinely, Sinclair’s objective aims to communicate the shared human experience, the

embodiment of the “specialness of life” no matter what genre she is employing at the moment, and that is what unites her work in spirit.  As this journey of experimentation unfolds she is striving to bridge her two distinct styles in an attempt to forge ahead, to connect with her audience her vision of the world as she sees it.

©Katherine Shevchenko, 

Art Consultant/Framing Designer

-J.R. Mooney Galleries, Boerne TX

Feb. 2015

 See Sidney Sinclair’s work in person, on view at J.R. Mooney Galleries of Fine Art, Boerne  TX.