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S A L L I E W O L F
Sallie Wolf is from Oak Park, Illinois and Sandwich, New Hampshire where she has summered since she was a child. She is a graduate of Brown University, (BA Anthropology, honors, Phi Beta Kappa) and The School of the Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois (BFA). Her landscapes of Squam Lake and the surrounding mountains remind us of the tranquility found in Japanese scenery. Working from sketches made on sight, Wolf combines charcoal drawings with watercolor and other drawing media. The result is soft and rich. Her subject matter is often a multi-sheet panoramic view, though each sheet stands as a painting by itself. The work is sold together or separately but the result is as breathtaking as the landscape it represents. Wolf's work is featured in public and private collections throughout the United States. www.salliewolf.com My father bought the red house in Center Sandwich, New Hampshire, when I was seven and I have spent almost every summer since looking out at the wonderful view of Squam, or sitting on the beach, staring across the lake at the same mountain ridges, the same boathouse, the same trees. As I sit on the beach I sketch. And at the end of my vacation I take my sketches home to Oak Park, a suburb directly west of Chicago. All of the mixed-media drawings were done in my studio in Oak Park, during the winter, from sketches done on sight in New Hampshire. For me they are about distance, dislocation, longing, loss, and memory. When I began translating my sketches into larger, multi-sheet works I intended to work strictly in watercolors. I had drawn up the scene in graphite on four sheets of paper, but found I had forgotten my brushes. Determined to make a start of some kind, I began to work the drawing in charcoal, creating a value study. The next day I came back with paint and brushes and worked into the charcoal. I added white acrylic gesso to get back to lighter values, and worked back and forth between watercolor, charcoal and gesso until I had a surface and colors I felt were complete. That was the start of this series of drawings. Enlarging a sketch forces me to seek out big brushes (2- to 4-inch flat brushes, including house-painting brushes) to try to reproduce the simplicity of the brush strokes, but the surface is worked much more full than in a sketch. And because I work from very small sources there is little detail and that pushes the larger drawings towards abstraction. I work across the multi-sheet panoramas all at one time, but I strive to have each sheet capable of standing on its own. I find that my color choices are influenced by the totally different palette of Chicago in the winter. New Hampshire in the summer is full of blue light, and a deep green. Chicago is gray and cold and a much yellowier green. The acrylic gesso adds a very cold white or gray and adds to the feeling of distance and dislocation. |
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