Title: The Crossing
Artist: Tanya Hayes Lee
Medium & Materials: Oil on cradled wood panel
Dimensions: 10" × 10"
The Crossing is an intimate, square, abstract landscape that captures a quiet, meditative passage of water, framed by dark coastal landforms. The work explores themes of journey and transition, with a bright blue channel cutting cleanly beneath a sweeping sky of misty violet and periwinkle cloud.
Gallery Description
In The Crossing, Tanya Hayes Lee presents a quiet, atmospheric landscape study on a compact 10" × 10" cradled wood panel. The composition uses a low-horizon arrangement, dedicating nearly two-thirds of the square surface to an expansive upper sky. Soft, scumbled washes of pale periwinkle, silver-white, and hazy blue build a damp coastal atmosphere that feels suspended in morning mist.
The lower third transforms this quiet light into a structured, rhythmic landscape plane. A bright cerulean water channel sweeps through the foreground, its glassy passage framed by dark, blocky shoreline ridges in charcoal, slate, and olive green. Several stylized vertical landforms rise from the banks, detailed with fine comb-like sgraffito that reveals a pale underlayer. Just beyond them, a horizontal ribbon of soft violet and plum suggests a distant ridge catching the day's first light. Lee's loose brushwork and subtle value shifts give this small-scale painting a profound sense of solitude, movement, and timeless calm.
Style & Composition
- Artistic style: Abstract Impressionism with a lyrical Tonalist sensibility.
- Composition: A low-horizon square layout that emphasizes the vast misty sky, balanced by an asymmetric wedge of water and structured vertical landforms along the ridge.
- Focal point: The bright cerulean water channel as it cuts sharply across the dark, high-contrast foreground banks.
- Color palette: A soothing cool-toned range of pale periwinkle blues, soft plum violets, and misty silver grays, anchored by deep charcoal black and dark olive green.
- Lighting and atmosphere: Soft, heavily diffused overcast light or low coastal fog, eliminating harsh shadows to create a tranquil, airy wilderness mood.
Application & Technique
- Brushwork and mark-making: Loose, painterly, and varied, combining soft dry brushing for airy sky gradients with flat structural blocks and fine vertical scratching that carves detail into the dark forms.
- Layering and depth: Strong atmospheric perspective creates depth, with dark foreground shapes anchoring the view while the low-contrast blue-gray sky recedes into the distance.
- Materials and tools: Heavy-body oil paint on a rigid cradled wood panel, using fine sgraffito techniques and soft blending tools to preserve crisp graphic patterns alongside smooth atmospheric transitions.
Inventory Status: Available for purchase online or in the gallery.
Shipping / Pickup: Shipping is available, with items securely packaged in professional archival materials, insured, and shipped globally; complimentary local pickup is also available at our 23 North Main Street gallery.
