Valerie Berkely

Four Birch Trunks, Oil Painting

2020

Artist Comments
Birches and aspen trees are one of Valerie's favorite subjects. She developed this piece by building layers of oil paint and then scraping them back with a palette knife to achieve the texture of birch bark. The edges of the gallery wrapped canvas are painted a neutral grey.

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: birches, aspens, trees, woods, forest, nature, representational, oil painting, red

Four Birch Trunks
Valerie Berkely
Oil painting on stretched canvas
Finished edges
Ready to hang
One-of-a-kind
Signed on front and back
2020
20 in. h x 16 in. w x .75 in. d
2 lbs. 0 oz.