Umbrella Arts opens its spring season with Sightings: Meadows Estuaries Ravines, paintings by Susan Mayr. Nineteen of the artist’s more personal works on paper, studies, and paintings, realizing perfect moments in nature throughout Nova Scotia, upstate New York and the Tennessee mountains will be on view through May 8th.

“Painting allows me to be an illusionist, to create my own place, to invent my own reality and tell stories about what I’ve seen. Except for intermittent sojourns in the country, I have almost always been an urban dweller longing for mountains, forests and seas. Each encounter with nature has to be treasured, memorized and relentlessly recalled. Oil paint, with the luminosity of glazes, the rich color and the possibility of applying layer after layer, is my medium. Each layer, even if it is scraped or wiped away or covered, retains its own memory. That memory is of a certain place and the countless attempts to define that place sensually. Those memories are bent in form and color until the paint speaks its language and I can listen.” – Susan Mayr