KAREN BLAIR | NEW WORK

NOVEMBER 6 - 29

Celebrate Phaeton Gallery’s fifth anniversary with a first look at a new collection of paintings by Karen Blair, inspired by nature’s quiet disturbances—the wind, birds in flight, and shifting light. Evoking Virginia in late summer, Blair invites us to slow down and observe the fleeting beauty of flowers, grasses, shadows, and sunlit fields, and, as poet Wendell Berry wrote, to “rest in the grace of the world.”

Known for her joyous color and exuberant mark-making, Blair balances the recognizable forms of the natural world with the expressive possibilities of abstraction. Her paintings capture both the vitality of a particular place and the elusive essence of a passing moment.

Blair divides her time between Charlottesville VA and Rockport ME. A member of The Albemarle Garden Club, The Garden Club of Virginia, and The Garden Club of America, she draws inspiration from her own gardens and those of friends. Flowers are prevalent throughout her work, serving as both subject and starting point for an ongoing exploration of perception, color, and form. Her paintings hold a constant tension between depicting the natural world and discovering the essence of things through abstraction.