We are pleased to announce the exhibition of new paintings by Washington artist and muralist Wendy Garner. This is Garner’s second solo show at Cross MacKenzie Gallery.  A native of California and a longtime resident of Italy and France, she is now based in Washington. She has exhibited her work often in Europe and collaborated on large-scale mural projects in Tuscany and locally.  She is a passionate observer of nature and the radiant effects of sunlight. 

Her previous investigation of the ocean’s powerful, roiling, surface resulted in her show titled, “New Wave Paintings” where she swirled her oils into translucent, watery expressions of the famous surfer’s challengers, “The Mavericks” and “Nouvalu”.  That series led her to an even more elusive subject now, as she looks aloft and studies the shifting, reflective clouds in the sky.  In this show titled, “Aloft” her paintings focus on that fleeting and fluid glimpse of a shape dancing across the canvas of the sky.  In Garner’s lushly painted canvases, the colors and shapes defining the clouds, alternate between having weight themselves and becoming only visible through the shadows they cast on water or land below.  A great variety of the atmosphere’s weather is represented in these 15 paintings; there are storm clouds gathering, cirrus clouds acting like paint brushes swiping across a deep blue void, and cumulus bubbling puffy white against a cerulean sky among others.  Consult your meteorologist to label the complete array of formations. For this viewer, suffice that the artist has unleashed her imagination and offers a beautiful tableaux for a day-dreamer’s delight where one can search to discover knowable elements in her shifting, weightless, contours.