Mariella Bisson

Artist

Studio Fenario, Woodstock NY

I make paintings using landscape imagery in order to explore color relationships, texture and the endless subtleties of paint itself. I work in mixed media on linen or on wood panel. My exploratory works on paper in watercolor, collage, printmaking and drawing form the basis for large-scale paintings made in my studio in Woodstock, NY. I named my space Fenario, because a fenario is a wild place, an unexplored wilderness or unknown region.

Momentum Gallery in Asheville, NC has a wide selection of my works and is my primary art dealer. They have reopened after recent hurricane and flooding in Asheville. Asheville Strong!

http://www.Momentumgallery.com

The Kentler International Drawing Space Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY http://www.kentlergallery.or

Bayview Gallery, Brunswick, Maine http://www.BayviewGallery.com

Artist’s Statement: My images of water, rocks and trees are filled with purposeful energy. Water is in constant motion, just as our own footsteps are endlessly moving, circling, coming and going, leaving and returning. Forces of nature compete and collide. Shapes within my compositions push against one another, intertwine, overlap and recede into space. Sunlight, as it plays across landscape forms, invites contrast in darkness and calls to the colors in shade and shadows. I achieve a deep three-dimensional space with the use of overlapping and application of colors – from light to dark with all stops in between and from warm to cool. I make my large mixed media paintings based on field drawings and watercolors painted on site in nature. I find essential shapes to convey my story and then apply paper collage glued to the linen over custom stretchers or on wood panels. An archival sealant is applied to prepare the paper to receive oil paint. My final surface of oil paint gives my work depth and finish.

I seek the universal in choosing my compositions. I want people to understand what they are seeing and relate it to their own lives – even subconsciously, feeling its energy in their own bodies or comparing the “characters” they see – rocks, trees, streams, roots, foliage- to aspects of their own experience, their own struggle for survival, their feelings of being rooted in home or routine, the flow and resistance they might encounter in life. We are all standing on one planet. The rivers of the earth and the clouds above are all one system, always changing, part of everyone’s experience, ever beautiful, in constant motion.