The wild calls with a compulsory invitation to join the creative creatures of the land and let imagination roam unfettered. Beasts become friends in stories and play. Trees and grasses become shelter. And inside the wild, thoughts are safe to ponder and the possibilities become hopeful. Those that enter can rest and dream, think and write.
In this oil and ink collaboration, artists CB Sherlock and Joanna Hallstrom share wild places where comfort and nourishment are found and received. Their works ask us to remember our childlike and cohesive relationship with nature and acknowledge it’s intrinsic value in the context of our global environmental crises.
CB Sherlocks’s musical depictions of trees, clouds, grasses, and land, flow in form and contrast. She wraps emotion into each pen and brush stroke. Her wayward depictions of the woodlands and sky are interwoven with letterforms that, on closer look, are the repeated words of the environmental activist, Greta Thunberg.
Joanna Hallstrom’s paintings place nature and adolescent humans in harmony, united by wonder and mutual affinity. Her animals are protective, standing like sentinels next to their their small friends. The space they share is unlikely and dangerous outside these artistic compositions. The blank and fading background that isolates the figures is a nod to an unsettled future.
Ink Drawings by CB Sherlock
Oil Paintings by Joanna Hallstrom