Sarah Bienvenu: Taking Time: Thirty Years of Painting New Mexico

For thirty years, Sarah Bienvenu's experiences painting and exploring New Mexico's mountains, canyons, and deserts have given her a unique ability to disentangle and interpret these past layers of change. She finds beauty in nature's ability to reveal accidental compositions through patterns and asymmetry: I look to the land to tell me how best to paint it, using the natural abstract shapes I see. Being attuned to such abstractions--the undulations of a dry riverbed, the jaggedness of rock against sky--is where abstraction becomes detail: detail of texture, detail of shape, detail of light and color and composition.

Watercolors provide the perfect medium for matching the immense variation and subtlety of Bienvenu's Subject. A closer look reveals that each individual element, as in nature, harmonizes with the collective whole. Realism is discovered in consonance: from a cast of light to a balance of colors.