British Artist Jo Tunmer has an extraordinary ability to read mood into landscape.  Her paintings, deliberately absent of people, carry in bulk the real substances of human experience.  Each of her works, drawn from a sketch or photo, has the quality of a faint, captivating memory.  She applies layers of oil paint over time, eventually varnishing the surfaces.  This process mirrors the way we relate to a natural space, becoming more firmly bound to it with repeated viewing. 

The landscapes draw from Diebenkorn and Hockney’s California paintings.  Their celebration of the sublime properties of pure color shows a kinship with Mark Rothko or even Barnett Newman.   The richly built-up skies populating her images absorb any emotional signifiers brought by the viewer.  As constructed natures, the paintings can be “inhabited” for longer than the countryside they stem from.  Tunmer’s source landscapes are viewed fleetingly, from moving cars.  By contrast, these paintings, in collections throughout the United States and Europe, compel viewers to stay with them for quite some time.