Somerville Manning Gallery invites you to a solo show of paintings by Christine Lafuente.
March 11th - April 9th, 2011. Opening reception Friday March 11th, 5:30 -7:30pm
In Christine Lafuente’s solo exhibition titled Forget Me Not, the artist makes references in her new work to love, longing and memory. The paintings are contemplations on the beauty of nature. Lafuente says she “paints only from life and only in natural light because that is how Nature reveals herself to me”. Each work is a conversation, a poem, to celebrate the beauty and joy she discovers in her visual experience.
Her still life compositions become love letters or offerings to the Beloved. The paintings are sacred gatherings of objects that resonate emotion. As on an altar, she brings together the bounty of the sea in the fish with its silvery grey- blue-greens, the bounty of the land in a bouquet of flowers and the bounty of mankind in crafted jars, bottles, clocks and tapestries.
Lafuente’s landscapes and garden paintings reveal an intimacy with the places she returns, season after season, year after year. Flowers such as peonies, roses, and forget-me-nots have personal meanings that connect with childhood loves. Of her friend’s home in the countryside, she says, “It is a place to commune with the landscape and the changing seasons. The peony bloom is the inauguration into easy long days of painting on the porch. This yields to the heat of summer, to swims, to painting into the evening as the sun drops orange and pink windows between the trees.”
Her peony and forget-me-not paintings are about the perennial nature of love. As they bloom, they awaken a dormant nostalgia. The opening bloom, as love, is an un-forgetting of our oneness with Nature and each other. These paintings of peony blooms mixed with tiny, delicate forget-me-nots are offerings of a hope to remember love with all its laughter, warmth, adventure and pleasure- to, in essence, forget me not.