Eve Werner is an award-winning acrylic and multi-media painter whose work explores natural subjects that have personal significance. She is known for her vivid use of color and values in expressively painted figurative work.

“Although my pieces begin with planning and forethought, they really come to life as paint, colors, and values interact. Acrylic paints allow me to work quickly, building several layers in each session. This continuity encourages the interplay between opposites conscious/subconscious, planned/spontaneous, physical/emotional and real/abstract – that gives the final piece its drama.”

Here at Vista Gallery, we are pleased to feature several paintings from Eve’s California Arborescence series. This series taps the beauty of the distinct and varied trees that define our forests and describe our California landscapes. “Our wonderful native trees are the bones from which shrubs, lichens, groundcovers, and even wildlife, hang. As a landscape architect selects tree species for their ability to “behave” properly in a given constructed setting, I admire our natives’ evolved ability to perfectly serve and thrive in their distinct ecosystems.”

The title of each piece in this series is a play on the botanical name for the tree that is represented. The first word, which is capitalized, is the tree’s genus. The second word, not capitalized and surrounded by quotation marks, is a fictitious cultivar name that Eve made up to imply or reinforce the concept of the painting.

These paintings are sold with a one-of-a-kind handmade frame that Eve paints and adorns using bark, leaves, cones, seeds, and other natural items gleaned from beneath the subject tree.

Eve is influenced by a variety of modernist and expressive artists, including the Bay Area Society of Six. She has studied painting in the Lake Tahoe and Mendocino coast areas of California since 1995, favoring subjects with underlying personal symbolism. When not painting, she relishes life in the Sierra Nevada with her family and practices landscape architecture. Her art is found in private collections throughout the United States.