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Erin Walrath’s exhibition, “Wanderings,” currently showing in the main dining room and bar, draws upon her extensive travels at home and abroad over the past decade to pursue formal art studies and seek out the myriad diversity of artistic inspirations from everyday life.
A native of Danbury, Conn., and B.F.A. recipient from the Rhode Island School of Design, she was chosen for a yearlong program in Rome to study Italian art, architecture and language, and produced a series of village and landscape sketches during a visit to southern France. As a professional artist, Walrath has completed numerous private commissions and worked as a muralist, photographer and book illustrator. Her artistic works have been exhibited at galleries in Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts. She credits varied artistic influences including the French painters Paul Gauguin, Puvis de Chavannes, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, as well as the Italian artist Alberto Burri.
Walrath affirms that she seeks to remember the “moving and sublime” elements of everyday experiences “and bring them to life again with my hands and eyes. The slow process of creating each piece is, in itself, a form of meditation for me in which I allow intuition to merge with intention. If I am successful, the result is a concentration of ‘moments’ of color across the canvas, resonating with and describing each other. To me, these colors represent the subtle harmony that exists in things as simple as the unfolding of a flower, sunlight on a piece of clay, or the color variation across a drop of rain on the window. These are the more abstract, and less noticed notes of incredible beauty that are often missed.”
Walrath notes that her wide-ranging travels “have brought me to tiny churches in Brazil, through olive groves in Italy, and down lonely, rainy streets in England. I have seen the stars from Mexico, trained through the history-soaked miles of Europe, and marveled at the changing landscape of my own country as I drove west into the sunset. Each place has cast a slightly different light on my perceptions and brought new appreciation into my work.”
Her artistic message is “both universal and personal,” Walrath explains, continually evolving even as the physical landscape around her changes. “If my paintings hold a message for anyone, or everyone, it is to pause, breathe deeply, and learn how to feel alive again and appreciate the gifts that life holds for anyone who takes the time to know them.”
Artist's Statement by Erin Walrath
When the mind and soul are free of the pressures and habitual madness of the “everyday,” we see more clearly, feel more fully, and are filled with a sense of wonder and joy. For many of us, these moments are few and far between, and too often quickly chased away again by the ringing of the telephone, the honking of a horn, or simply the onslaught of our own thoughts reminding us to “do this” and “do that”. We have forgotten how to just be alive.
In my life, I seek to remember, and to experience the moving and sublime that exists in everyday. In my work, I take the fullest moments I have stumbled upon, and bring them to life again with my hands and eyes. The slow process of creating each piece is, in itself, a form of meditation for me in which I allow intuition to merge with intention. If I am successful, the result is a concentration of “moments” of color across the canvas, resonating with and describing each other. To me, these colors represent the subtle harmony that exists in things as simple as the unfolding of a flower, sunlight on a piece of clay, or the color variation across a drop of rain on the window. These are the more abstract, less noticed notes of incredible beauty that are often missed. In this way, I can celebrate something as recognizable as the beauty of a skyline while still paying tribute to the moments and details that comprise it.
The need to unplug and to step away from my surroundings has led me to many vantage points from which I have looked upon the world. Each place has cast a slightly different light on my perceptions and brought new appreciation into my work. My travels have brought me to tiny churches in Brazil, through olive groves in Italy, and down lonely, rainy streets in England. I have seen the stars from Mexico, trained through the history-soaked miles of Europe, and marveled at the changing landscape of my own country as I drove west into the sunset... and there is so much more to see....
If my paintings hold a message for anyone, or everyone, it is to pause, breathe deeply, and learn how to feel alive again and to appreciate the gifts life holds for anyone who takes the time to know them. Both universal and personal, it is a message that I teach myself with every brushstroke, or square, or shoe-nail I affix to a painting, and one that I will probably forever be learning as the landscape changes.
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