Materese Roche

As a child, Materese remembers pouring through art books and being entranced with two telling paintings, Thomas Gainsborough’s, The Blue Boy, and Pierre Renoir’s, Dance at Bougival. One painting powerfully representational; the other emotionally stirring: a combination she would strive to mesh as an adult artist.

Classically trained in highly representational art, she understands and considers all of the technical aspects of painting one learns as a student, yet in her work there is a luminosity that is impossible to teach. Her decidedly crisp and technical still lifes seem in direct contrast to her atmospheric whispery landscapes.

To Materese, it is not about painting the still life as she sees it or capturing the meadow at a specific moment, instead her interest lies in the essence of these subjects. She is fascinated by the minutiae of angles, as well as the contrasts between the clarity and blur of nature. She seeks to incorporate all of her senses into her paintings; the feeling of air on her skin, the smell of salt air, the quiet in her studio, and it is this integration that makes her work distinct.

In a world where so much mystery has been explained and technology encroaches upon us, Materese has a clearness of vision that lets her continue to search, not for the answers, but for universal truths. It is through her paintings that one can discover what she has found.

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