DEAN DAY GALLERY

Sheryl Daane Chesnut was born in the Seattle area but, moved at an early age to Marblehead, MA. While still in grade school she moved to the Bay Area in California, and the west coast has been her home since then. Daane Chesnut received a Bachelor of Fine Art in painting and printmaking from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara. After graduation she worked as a graphic and product designer earning national and international awards.  Although she now works full time as an artist, her years in design are evident in the color, composition and balance in her paintings.

Sheryl Daane Chesnut’s mixed media work uses a combination of acrylics, charcoal and oil sticks, spray paint, and gold and silver leaf to create ethereal paintings that intentionally blur the line between abstract and representational. Her work is loose and intuitive and gains a rich complexity as successive layers are added and etched away. There is no plan; the work takes on a life of its own. Her abstract work utilizes color, line and movement to create artwork that engages the viewer from every angle. Her figurative and landscape work reduces the details to simple lines and rough strokes in order to capture the mood and essence more than the person itself. Utilizing line, shape and color to draw the viewer in, Sheryl hopes to evoke an emotion of tranquility or joy, serenity or introspection.

 

"My current work is fluid and elegant, non-representational abstracts using the environment as my inspiration. Instead of seeing the landscape as a whole, I am focusing on the beauty in the details. Playing with a variety of natural elements: salts, minerals and powdered earth pigments, solvents and polymers, metals and mixed media as well as oil and acrylic paint, I boil and pour, layer and etch away. Strokes and scratches appear to be exposed from underneath layers of ice and stone giving the work immense detail and depth. Metals float gently across, transparent layers entrap movement underneath, and the minerals dry and crystallize to create an ice like surface. I strive to capture the essence of the natural environment: earth and water, stone and moss, elements and minerals."