Sheri Bakes: Wonderland Trail

Sheri Bakes: Wonderland Trail. March 2 - 25, 2023, First Thursday Opening March 2, 6-8 pm; Regular Gallery Hours, 10 - 6 Tues-Sat. IMAGE: Sheri Bakes, "Into the Mist," 2023, oil on canvas, 54 x 54 inches. Sheri Bakes has been painting the natural world with an ethereal intensity for more than 20 years. In Wonderland Trail, her new series of landscape paintings, the artist focuses on her close friend's challenging circumnavigation of Mt. Rainier. 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 the 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 cacaphony of modern existence.