SHERI BAKES | SUNSET GARDEN
Sheri Bakes | Sunset Garden
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
October 2 - 14, 2021
Sunset Garden reflects Sheri Bakes’ ongoing interest in wind and breathwork, and how to make visible, with paint, the often invisible life force that courses through the natural environment and our connection to it. The Vancouver Island based painter currently lives on a 50 acre farm and the meadows, forest, lake, and pastures that surround her offer up ever-changing vistas for inspiration and source imagery. The stippled dabs and strokes of colour and light that have become representative of the artist’s signature style reveal Bakes’ interest in referencing the atmospheric particles that weave and cycle between and through us.
Sheri Bakes states:
When I walk through landscape, I dissolve. You become the environment that you are walking through and your separation from the environment no longer exists. There is a distinct feeling of wholeness and I attempt to re-create this in my work.
On a more personal level, this show is painted for and dedicated to the artist’s mother Frieda Bakes, who passed away earlier this year. Frieda passed on her awe of sunsets to her daughter and the artist would observe her seeking refuge in her own garden through difficult times and failing health. Sunset Garden celebrates these shared moments where human bonds and receiving solace in nature become inextricably intertwined. These windswept, light and hope-filled landscape paintings, with their pronounced ebb and flow, are equal parts evocation, elegy, and an invocation to joy.