Valerie Berkely

Pretty Pastel Sky, Oil Painting

2022

Artist Comments
Artist Valerie Berkely offers a dreamy, light-filled atmospheric scene in soft gradient hues of purple and orange. She captures the glowing twilight with a glimpse of the moon from behind the clouds. Thick coastal vegetation greets the ocean's waves and fades out into the horizon. Valerie uses a limited palette of cool transparent hues on top of a textured orange. With the use of her fingertips, she blends and scrapes the surface, revealing rocks, trees, and foliage found at the shore.

About the Artist
Valerie Berkely uses her finger tips as brushes to create her abstract paintings. For Valerie, the art is all about the process, the paint, her mood, and the moment. She admires the artist Wolf Kahn, who once said, “the picture is the conclusion of an experiment in which the hint of an image becomes actuality." Like Kahn, Valerie’s paintings combine pictorial landscapes with painterly abstraction. The vibrant primary colors capture the hues of the sun rising and setting, and the texture of her fingers across the surface divides sea, land, and sky. There is something very dreamy about these works, exemplified by their color, texture, and atmospheric quality. Valerie’s first “art epiphany” was seeing Seurat's La Grande Jatte at the Art Institute of Chicago. “Bowled me over! I actually fell down. And I knew I was to become a painter.”

Words that describe this painting: impressionism, texture, cool, shore, coast, moon, sky, water, ocean, seascape, cloudscape, oilpaint, dreamy, impressionism, seascape, oil painting, purple

Pretty Pastel Sky
Valerie Berkely
Oil painting on cradled wood panel
Natural wood edges
One-of-a-kind
Signed on front and back
2022
20 in. h x 16 in. w x 1.5 in. d
3 lbs. 3 oz.