Daily Encounters

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My art is a quiet response to surrounding landscapes and daily events. It is an attempt to record a mysterious beauty that reveals itself unexpectedly in familiar places, sometimes slowly over time, sometimes in split-second vanishing flashes.

For years, my paintings have been made directly from the landscape, mostly out of a need to be outside as much as possible. In 2021, curious to see what could come from memory, imagination, design, and invention, I made daily drawings in a journal which continues today.

Each day I coax a small charcoal drawing from memories of actual visual events. Occasionally and more recently, these charcoal drawings have been translated to oil painting. This is something that may evolve into a more regular practice.

Another habit of mine has been to go to the nearby park during lunchbreaks to paint with gouache or watercolor in small sketchbooks.

All my work feels like practice for future work, yet each painting and drawing seems to hold its own place in space and time.

ARTIST BIO: 
Stacy Caldwell lives, works, and paints in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where she inherited a love of  fields, hills, rivers, and streams from generations of Mennonite farmers. The journey into painting began  while working at a local university where she spent evenings studying painting, drawing, and art history. 

In 2018 a three-week residency in an historic dune shack on the Outer Cape of Massachusetts became  an especially transformative experience. More recently, five months of pandemic isolation correlating  with the mentorship of E.M. Saniga has had an important impact. 

In 2021, inspired by the journal drawings of François Dupuis, Stacy committed to her own daily practice  using charcoal in a Moleskine journal and drawing from surprise encounters, memories, and the  fleeting images of daily life. 

Currently, Stacy works full-time and devotes most evenings, weekends, and lunch breaks to going  outside and painting.