June Yokell – Anniversary Art Exhibition – Artist Portfolio Magazine

5 Year Anniversary Art Exhibition – Artist Portfolio Magazine

June Yokell – San Rafael, CA

I’ve been working on paintings of California Landscapes depicting aspects of beauty and loss. Observations of the natural world have dominated my experience for as long as I can remember. Besides being influenced by painters such as Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gough, Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, and a variety of Asian landscape artists, I am also influenced by literature. Some of the writers whose work I admire are Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Louise Erdrich, Karl Ove Knausgaard. The sources of my work are cell phone photographs printed on regular printing paper taken during various walks, hikes or looking out of windows. I start my paintings by a gesture and try to keep the whole painting fresh from the beginning when I lay down the large planes right through to the layering of the many marks of paint that indicate plants or water or cracks in the hill. What I hope to achieve are non-verbal felt experiences of the physical world, which are vibrant, alive, and mysterious.