Kaller Fine Arts News Blog

Today marks the inaugural installment of the Kaller Fine Arts blog. From time to time I will use this space to discuss events or people in the art world that readers may find interesting.

Yesterday I visited the studio of artist Sabre Esler in Atlanta, Georgia. Sabre is known to many of you as a painter of lyrical land and waterscapes, bustling city scenes and impressionist figurative work that straddle the line between abstraction and realism. What has always impressed me about her art is the very painterly quality of her brushwork. If you isolate large swathes of her canvases (which sometimes incorporate collage to add visual heft and depth) you see beautiful layered, loose strokes of color that stand on their own as investigations of how the application of paint can evoke atmosphere and perspective in an abstract way.

Last year, Sabre was influenced by travel and participation in art workshops to focus on breaking her work down into planes, with a resulting new group of work focusing on rooflines and cityscapes. The juxtaposition of moody brushwork and architectonics provides visual energy and tension in this new group of work.

Notable shifts in works around the studio since my last visit included larger canvases (a gorgeous new 60x60 waterscape will be wending its way to Kaller Fine Arts this week) and subtle color palette changes. Sabre, like many artists, enjoys working on a large scale. “It is a lot of fun to work large – I get to push a lot of paint around, and it becomes more about creating dynamics of color, and not as much about what an object is,” she notes.

Sabre has plans for travel to Portugal and Burgundy in 2010. The oceans and vineyards of those countries should provide fodder for her constant artistic inquiries into how to suggest atmospheric qualities through the application of paint.