“I usually paint from my memory’s images of my surroundings. I started to think about mountains from my past: upstate New York, my winters spent at the MacDowell Artist Colony in New Hampshire, areas I am familiar with. But these memories were 20 to 40 years old and quite fuzzy. I hit an impasse. So, I looked at photos. Shrugged. I looked at paintings of mountains. Shrugged again. All so literal. I had to force myself to grow, expand my visual comfort zone to incorporate and abstract mountains enough so these interpretations weren’t just mountain renderings. For the work to be successful, I needed to capture essence and not the land mass itself. I persevered, climbing this creative process and across family crisis: my mother’s death and recent near death of my father. And to me, it seems that this year I scaled more than one mountain.”
– Sylvia Benitez
