Title: Trust
Artist: Tanya Hayes Lee
Medium & Materials: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 20" × 20"
Trust is a deeply meditative square color-field landscape that captures the soft dissolution of boundaries within dense atmospheric mist. The work explores a state of peace and emotional openness, allowing land and sky to merge into a muted pastel field of quiet light.
Description
In Trust, Tanya Hayes Lee creates a minimalist, atmospheric landscape on a 20" × 20" square canvas. The composition removes traditional physical landmarks, such as defined trees or hard coastlines, and instead treats the surface as an open field of color, light, and air. A soft, rolling horizon of muted olive, sage, and dark earth greens grounds the lower quarter. Along the lower right, a deep charcoal glaze provides a quiet visual anchor, giving the otherwise weightless scene a subtle sense of physical presence.
The painting's emotional focus lies in its expansive upper atmosphere. A soft, scumbled field of misty sage green and pale warm ochre creates the sensation of damp morning fog. Across the center-left sky, a delicate wash of lavender and violet moves diagonally through the haze, like the first light of sunrise breaking through a heavy marine layer. Lee's velvet-smooth brushwork and restrained value shifts give the painting a profound sense of quiet mystery, timeless calm, and contemplative stillness.
Style & Composition
- Artistic style: Tonalism with a color-field abstract landscape sensibility.
- Composition: A low-horizon square layout built from soft horizontal bands, with a gentle diagonal wash of lavender breaking the symmetry and guiding the eye across the canvas.
- Focal point: The luminous central band of lavender and violet light as it emerges through the misty sage sky.
- Color palette: A soothing, nature-inspired range of soft sage greens, pale ochres, and muted lavenders, anchored by deep charcoal black and dark olive green.
- Lighting and atmosphere: Soft, heavily diffused early-morning light filtering through thick fog or low cloud cover, creating a quiet, meditative countryside mood.
Application & Technique
- Brushwork and mark-making: Soft scumbling and heavily blended dry brushing create continuous cloud-like gradients across the canvas, leaving a velvety surface with no harsh lines.
- Layering and depth: Transparent dark glazes at the base ground the viewing plane, while low-contrast lavender light recedes into an expansive atmospheric distance.
- Materials and tools: Heavy-body oil paint on stretched canvas, applied with ultra-soft blending mops and large flat bristle brushes to achieve seamless, misty color 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.
