Christine Lafuente’s upcoming exhibition, City and Sea, introduces bodies of work created from new vantage points in Venice, Italy, and Brooklyn, NY where she lives and keeps a studio throughout the year. Alongside these new oils and watercolors are seascapes from the coast of Maine where Lafuente returns annually to paint en plein air and gather visual experiences to later scale up into large seascapes in her Brooklyn studio.
Whether her subject be city or sea, her paintings explore how light and atmosphere affect color. Painting directly from life, Lafuente captures the ephemeral. Her paintings are painterly and poetic in response to how nature reveals herself. “Along the coast there is air in the trees, there is water in the air, the tones of water and sky are only known in relation to one another. In the city, what is near and far often coalesce, edges are lost, buildings of steel and concrete lose their solidity in a bath of warm afternoon light,” Lafuente expounds.
Her painterly approach to her subjects gives way to a sense of abstraction in keeping with late JMW Turner. Like Turner, Lafuente has command of both oil and watercolor. Her watercolors of Maine, Venice, and Brooklyn share a fluidity, but each has a distinct palette and color harmony. The small-scale atmospheric paintings composed from her window in Brooklyn combine her poetic way of seeing with the familiar skylines of Brooklyn church steeples, Lower Manhattan skyscrapers, and the New York harbor.
Lafuente holds an A.B. in English from Bryn Mawr College, a Certificate in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and an M.F.A. in Painting from Brooklyn College. An award-winning artist, Lafuente has received an Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, been included in the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and most recently received a Medal for Achievement in Visual Arts from the Philadelphia Sketch Club. Her work is part of many public and private collections. She has exhibited in New York, London, and extensively along the east coast. Lafuente lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
