Marsha Connell Fine Art At Corrick’s
About The Artist
Marsha Connell is a Northern California artist known for her evocative collages and her colorist paintings in oil, watercolor, and pastel. Her work has been exhibited widely in solo and group shows and in art and literary publications.
An Adjunct Professor in Santa Rosa Junior College’s Art Department and Associate Seminar Professor in Sonoma State University’s Depth Psychology Program, she has also presented workshops and lectures in many California venues, as well as in Alaska, New Mexico, Oregon, New York, and Mexico.
Artist Statement
My artwork has two major directions: expressive landscape painting and narrative collage.
My paintings are about the spirit of place. Though my subjects are inspired by my travels both here and abroad, I find some of my most resonant themes in Northern California, where I have lived for over thirty years. Painting on location, en plein air, in oil, watercolor, or pastel, I observe the place: mood, shapes, color, and spatial relationships. I reflect on how the sense of place affects my own interior landscape.
The energetic pleasure of moving brush and paint keeps me from getting distracted by small details. I am attentive to nuances of color and value, but do not require fidelity to local color; expressive color often feels more true. Watching, listening, trusting intuition and gesture-infuse my painterly representation with an abstract sensibility.
I enrich the freshness of the initial exploration with the luminosity that builds from glazing and scumbling layers of color, continuing over time with return visits to a site and more meditative painting in the studio. This can evoke a new place of some mystery to me, a place of the heart.
Giclée prints in limited fine art editions make the oil painting images available to a wider audience.
