Caryn Vainio

As a child I was in the forests, and so the forests are in me. The chaos of my childhood was mitigated by the countless hours I willingly spent alone in the forest finding

silence. The shapes imprinted on me.

 

The unique light and stark geometry of the Pacific Northwest mountain forests

inspires my current work in painting and printmaking. Rather than paint the

landscape literally, I pull shapes and form from the landscape for my compositions

and pull hues from my emotional connection to the landscape for color.

 

With these invented landscapes as the initial foundation, I use both printmaking and

painting as different starting points on a journey to the same destination, with my

printmaking particularly exploring ideas of interference and disruption – the

disruption of the real and the organic by the unreal, the artificial, and the inorganic.

These themes surface from my long career working in the world of games and

virtual reality making the unreal feel real.