“Color Stories”

 Continuing her Close Looking Series, this new abstract mixed media collection expands Cheri Vilona’s non-verbal storytelling by pairing varied color palettes with many mediums, gestures, and textural layers.  These paintings blend individual color palette choices with bold and subdued lines, shapes and motion to create coloristic unity, complexities, and joyful conversations. 

The artist has chosen colors that move her personally as she explores how oil colors can share vibrations of energy and emotion within each work.  Mixed Media components further expand into deeper, varied and inquisitive pathways, different chapters in Cheri’s artistic story as her feelings are conveyed on canvas to be uniquely experienced with colors.

“Through our Collective and Independent Lens”

"These Mixed Media paintings on Paper and Canvas have many layers of paint, revealing parts of the canvas’s history and underlying influences and inspiring my responses. I love working with this rich textural and patterned influence,, and use many unconventional tools to move the oil paint and mixed media on the surfaces. I often add carbon, oil stick, wax, oil paint, antique and hand-made papers and India ink, embracing accidents and discoveries.  There is always an inspiration coming from our landscape and natural environment in my work, and as an artist exploring, discovering new pathways for painterly and emotional responses, painting works that resonate excitement in the parlay of materials combined with process, hinting views in the initial inspiration of nature, is my ultimate joy." Cheri Vilona, 2022

Oil on Canvas and Panel Paintings:

 RED and BLUE Series-2019

“During my initial painting sessions exploring abstract movement and gestures, my canvases were painted full frame, fully informed by brush strokes and color pathways.  I see these pieces as emotive energetic paintings, with color explorations and movement as their core conversations.  Continuing deeper with this new language of abstraction, during further passes and more developed mediums with oil on canvas, I opened the movement, incorporating both large sweeping gestures with calm conversations in color and intuitive responses to the canvas’ narrative.

 This series is very exciting work for me, as an artist exploring both medium and process, all in the quest of conveying feelings of confidence and energy as an oil painter in the abstract.  I stand back a lot more these days, and read each work as it unfolds, really listening to what it wants from my brush and color choices.  Allowing the painting process to be simple or complex, the overall final view to excite with both statements of energy and peacefulness, final harmonies building as layers of oil on canvas that communicate the story of my artistic process to each viewer.” Cheri Vilona