Burnt Cove Watercolors of the Maine Landscape by Gerald Matthew Immonen

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Since 1998 Gerald Immonen has spent roughly half of each year at his home and studio located at the head of Burnt Cove in Stonington, Maine on Deer Isle. Immonen has witnessed the beauty of an environment in flux: the changing tides, the leisurely transition of forest colors, the encapsulating fog, and thunderous rainstorms. The essence of this spectacular landscape permeates each composition in this new suite of watercolors.  In these intimate works, some as small as six inches square, the artist offers various glimpses of wooded areas that convey, with exuberant celebration, his fascination with the quiet theater of the natural world.  Immonen captures the shifting light as it cascades across rocks and trees with brushwork that ranges from the meticulous to highly expressive. Speckles of paint and sweeping slashes are layered atop depictions of twisted branches that stretch to the sky.  Immonen’s watercolors are less about a literal representation of place, but rather the intangible spirit of being enveloped by nature.

Gerald Immonen received his BFA and MFA degrees from Yale University and is a Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Immonen’s paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, NY and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN.