Stephanie Law
Where the Sea Meets the Sky
December 2, 2017 – January 7th, 2018
Opening Reception with the artist: Saturday, December 2nd, 6-8pm
Northport, NY– Haven Gallery is pleased to present “Where the Sea Meets the Sky”, a solo exhibition of new work by California based artist Stephanie Law. “Where the Sea Meets the Sky” is Law’s first solo show with the gallery and will include fourteen new paintings that comingle the enchanted, mythological worlds found both within and between the sky and the sea. A narrative and symbolic exploration of life is encapsulated in Law’s worlds as she rhythmically paints with watercolors and dances amorphous patterns of gold leaf to ensconce Odyssean tales capturing the beginning, middle and coda of time and being.
Ocean is primordial, both in mythic traditions, and in the evolutionary sense. Many creation myths begin with the churning division of Sea and Sky. This first segmentation of opposing forces is the beginning of order in a chaotic universe, and the surface tension where those two come together or clash is what defines that separation.
Law’s fabled worlds teem with animals and people as they breach known physics and traverse the sea, sky and land with a poetic grace and Arcadian harmony. An in-between realm is bestowed upon us in which all living things coexist harmoniously. We are transported a world that runs parallel to our own, a place of dreams laced with verisimilitude that bridge the gap between the past and present.
ABOUT STEPHANIE LAW
Stephanie Law’s work is an exploration of mythology mixed with her personal symbolism. Her art journeys through surreal otherworlds, populated by dreamlike figures, masked creatures, and winged shadows. The fantastical permeates through the visions with a promise that this is a world that underlies reality, when viewed with a desire for beauty and a shifted perception.
Archetypes, the basis for the universal appeal of mythological concepts, are one of the defining inspirations for her imagery. This is mingled with the movement of dance. Stephanie has been a dancer for almost two decades, and she uses that experience of how the human body moves and emotes to create a bridge into her artwork so that not only do the humans dance across the page, but the branches of her trees move with a sinuous grace, and the arrangement of inanimate elements has a choreographed rhythm and flow.
Growing up in California, Stephanie has been surrounded by the wealth of natural inspiration all around her. The twisting boughs of live oaks from the hills near her home insinuate themselves into her paintings. The chaos of Nature’s wild growth, and conversely the beauty of decay, echo in the textures and fractal patterns of her work.
She currently showcases her personal work in group and solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, San Francisco, Nashville, and San Diego, while continuing to publish book collections of her art via Shadowscapes Press. The most recent volume is Descants and Cadences. Her work has also been included in the Spectrum annual of fantastic art in for several years, and at the Spectrum showcase in September 2014 at the Society of Illustrators in NY. Her botanical art has been showcased in internationally juried exhibitions at botanical gardens and arboretums. Recent work features insects, imaginative plants, and fae creatures, interwoven into a miniature world that is often overlooked, when size and physical permanence is equated with importance.
