Sarah Ratchye: Looking Up

Friedrichs Pontone is delighted to present a series of 35 watercolor paintings by Sarah Ratchye. The collection, titled Ski, portrays Ratchye's fascination with the Utah landscape, as she notes skies and mountain ranges as her inspiration. 

Sarah Ratchye's Artist Statement: 

I live and make art in Park City, UT.  Every day I am in my studio, I watch the dramatic and dynamic skies above the Wasatch Mountains.  

The clouds in a winter sky are typically lavish and abundant.  Huge puffs carve out and shape the borders of cerulean sky behind them. Wide, long bands of purple or deep gray stretch across the horizon, pushing through solid white bubbles or pastel marshmallows, a whip of deep pink or ochre touches the edges.  Sometimes the pile of shapes moves very fast, so fast that one loses one's balance on the road below, watching a cloud shift overhead. 

There are days when my view is prefaced by snow. The sky is gray, shifting and angry, and snow falls all day and night.   The sun is a smear of yellow ochre, beaming weakly through that weather.  

I try to translate the vastness and grandeur, the fast and slow wandering, and the ski's floating messages of impending change onto the paper.   Clouds are light or heavy, rimmed with dark shades, ephemeral as nothing but appearing as substance. Within the painting are recognizable images, memories of my days walking in the woods.  The paintings capture a few hours of time watching and painting a day's disrupted atmospheric activity.