Art & Music | Art

Rachelle Krieger
Port Washington
Solid Air

It takes a pretty bold person to attempt to capture the sky. And a pretty humble artist to catch it. It’s a gentle balance and it is the aim of this painter who uses sumi-e ink and watercolors, drawing, scraping and scratching at the boards that host her exploration of surrealism: “I’m trying to get a little lyrical.” Her work has been primarily about nature, grouping series in periods of a couple of years to a handful, but it is the recent shifts in technique and approach that have brought a new direction to her renderings.

Fundamentally, change first manifested in the focus of her subjects. Krieger went from concentrating on structured and organized formal gardens to the “chaos and decay” that time brings about in nature. The shift happened as a matter of serendipity, while the artist was painting at sands point preserve, but it took hold viscerally for a woman whose main life events have coincided with storms. The very essence of nature’s yin-yang is now at her wrist as she couples the formalism of landscape plein air painting with evocative abstraction.

Her springboard is “the power of the storm, and of nature, as a metaphor for our lives.” The panels are her interpretations of breadth and “the expansion of breath” that is physiologically experienced when contemplating the sky, whether it be moody or gentle; though her tendency is towards the stormy. The works are not sad, though, and Rachelle feels “people will relate to the storminess—on a personal level—and also respond to the expansiveness.”