Wrona Gall

Solar Retreat

2023

After a forty-year career painting in an industrial loft in Chicago, Wrona relocated to Ojai, California in 2015 where the open horizon of Ojai’s natural beauty expanded her vision from roof-top viewed swatches of blue to vast horizons that glow with emotional intensity. As a child Wrona often stared out her bedroom window and studied the movement of clouds to escape from family drama. The changing panorama suggested the possibility of change from negativity to positivity. The sky’s mutability still provides a personal source of serenity that infuses her work. To create her translucent veils of colors, she stopped using brushes and manipulates her pigments directly with her hands. She grinds pigments - both dry and liquid - into her wooden panels to create the feathery wisps that dominate even the dark stormy reflections. Critics have referred to these glazes and scumbles as Turner-like gauzes of light and color. Her current work at bG Gallery has a sensual depth that encompasses how humans interact with the sights, sounds and scents of nature. Even her small panels evoke the majesty of cosmic visions. Her art goes beyond traditional representation of meteorological effects to introduce an emotional depth that resonates a strong experience of nature recreated in an interior environment, both physical and reflective. Her grandest painting, A Summer’s Day fills a large wood panel with bright shining light across expanses of clouds down to a low horizon meadow of orange and yellow poppies. Energy and movement in brilliant turquoise, azure to deep dark shades of indigo comprise the scene in Azure Moment. Tempest Sky, although the smallest of her paintings at 10 x 12 inches, still draws the viewer into her richly encompassing atmospheric realms. Subtle intrusions of geometric lines and interior borders throughout her works reconnect us to the relationship between the human or man-made and natural worlds, the encroachment of anthropogenic elements into nature, and the search for balance between the two.