Landscape Paintings

ADDITIONAL PAINTINGS CAN BE VIEWED IN THE EVENTS & EXHIBITIONS PAGE in the Current Exhibit section.

Christie Scheele uses the interface between the actual landscape and the artist-created landscape as her source for endless interpretation. The world provides both visual joy and a wealth of information, but the artist gets to--and must--choose how to use it... How to distill the landscape into a powerful new reality? How to paint a cow, different from any other cow? How to reduce detail so that the viewer feels that the impact of the color/shape/surface is huge, but doesn't feel that anything is missing?

As a well-established modern landscape painter with a background in contemporary art, Scheele reflects her own time. Instead of idealizing the landscape for the sake of sentiment or narrative, she idealizes the images that she paints for the formal purposes of enhancing the interlocking shapes that create the composition; their softened edges; and, the color that carries modulations of surface detail within the shapes. She believe that these abstract elements can elicit joy (and provoke deeper responses) in their own right, which is a modern concept. (Continued below...)

Please click on an image below to display a larger version above.
Additional paintings by Christie Scheele are on view in our EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS page as part of our Current Exhibition: New & Recent Pastels.

Drawing on the lineage of the abstract minimalists and color field painters from the mid-20^th century (rather than on traditional studio or plein air landscape painters) she prefers to reduce a scene to its essentials - to record what is important without distraction or visual clutter; thus, to enable the viewer to experience an "expansive, chest-opening, breath-deep kind of meditative awe" in front of the landscape. Her version of minimalism is about shape and atmospherics: to paint not just the light, but the air itself, and to show how these elements affect the edges and colors - and level of abstraction - of the scenes depicted.

Christie Scheele is represented by numerous galleries throughout the Northeast, including 12 years with Albert Shahinian Fine Art, and is known for her atmospheric, sometimes minimalist landscapes. She bridges both abstraction and contemporary representation to produce work of exceptional emotional depth and insight.

ASFA is also regional "home base" for the artist and the gallery always has on hand a large and diverse selection of her oils, pastels and mixed-media paintings. An appended bio and photos of new work on view can be found on our "Exhibitions & Events" page. Her current exhibit continues through September.