Subtle and delicate shifts of colour, calm expanses of reflected light, or deeply glowing twilight atmospheres, characterise the moving and quietly contemplative landscape paintings of Sonia Stanyard.
 
Reference points in the landscape, a tree, a bridge, a window, are caught between materialising and dissolving, and precise detail and definition melt away into diffusion.  Sometimes titles, such as ‘Emerging Oak‘ allude to this suggestive presence where gentle prompts are made to find and know places that seem to be real, but are just beyond grasp.
 
These veiled visions that float as if in a dream might be seen as melancholic, but in this stillness a profoundly poetic, optimistic connection with both the power and the fragility of the natural world is made. Far more than specific identifiable places, these are personal landscapes, softly evocative, at times enigmatic or beguiling.
 
Stanyard draws inspiration from the sublime qualities in Russian and Scandinavian art and the Romanticism of Caspar David Freidrich, as well as from the expressive power of abstraction, Mark Rothko in particular.
 
Deliberately avoiding location sketches or photographs, written notes capture her emotive responses to places. In the studio she floods the surface with translucent, fluid paint, tilting the canvas to make coloured diffusions, carefully controlling the unfolding activity, and delicately accentuating suggestions. In the crucial stages of work when the visible might appear, sensitive tuning to the original sensations takes place; the masses, vapours and reflections of the landscape then come to life.

Originally from Yorkshire Stanyard graduated from Southampton Institute and now lives and works in London. In 2007 she won a scholarship award at the Vermont Studio Centre, USA. She has an international exhibiting profile with shows at Paula Barr Gallery, New York and Waterhouse and Dodd, Cork Street, London. She has exhibited extensively in the UK including at Four Square Fine Art, Lewes and at art fairs in London, Brighton and Glasgow.