AFLAME
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Alane Levinsohn
Desert landscape and figurative artist living in Joshua Tree CA. Alane attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, now known as California College of the Arts. Just before graduation she had the opportunity to live in Brussels, Paris, and Frankfurt and spent three years traveling through Europe. I took classes at the school of fine arts in Brussels, and while in Paris, the Louvre became her favorite destination. Upon returning to the States, she worked as a fashion illustrator for department stores. Desert Skies Aflame The desert is renowned for its spectacular sunsets and sunrises: brilliant colors, dramatic clouds fill the skies. Night skies are a canopy of stars. The juxtaposition between the surreal beauty of the skies and the harsh desert topography is what I am exploring in this series of landscapes. The sharp needled Joshua trees and yuccas, the dangerous beauty of palm trees, the ground unforgiving while the skies invite. These pastel paintings examine the juxtaposition of the beautiful fire colored skies with the inhospitable desert and sharply defined desert vegetation. The desert draws one in with its beauty at the same time the plants are dangerous with cactus spines, leaves as sharp as shards of glass or simply toxic. Stark landscapes beckon with the promise of solitude and become deadly with the lack of water. These paintings capture that dissonance of the desert: the beauty and the danger. Pastel paintings with their pure pigments lend themselves perfectly to capture the vivid skies and stark landscape. For centuries pastels have retained their brilliance without the yellowing that was typical of oils. These painting use archival pigments and substrate with museum style plein air frames for protection.
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