“Moorea can truly be called "Paradise on Earth". Last June, I traveled to this place, a volcanic island in the middle of the South Pacific and part of Tahiti. This paradise I had read about was where I now stood with paints and brushes. My greatest challenge was seeing through its picture-postcard beauty. It is real, after all.”
Rocky Neck Gallery’s next exhibit of the Summer Artist Series is Oil Paintings from Cape Ann to Tahiti by artist Rokhaya Waring. The show opens Wednesday, August 31st until Tuesday, Sept. 13th. The exhibit includes landscapes and seascapes of her travels in Tahiti and her home in Cape Ann.
Waring is drawn to things growing side-by-side: cultivated fields, gardens, and rows of trees. Her work evokes the processes of a simpler time, when one’s primary interaction with nature was carving very small pieces of it into breakfast, lunch and dinner. Waring believes that because of nature’s fragility, the pleasure is transitory and bittersweet.
“I want to capture it in a way that is timeless without being static. I want viewers to feel the wind and the sun, sense the space and light.”
On Tahiti I was drawn by the swiftly changing clouds, lush vegetation, and the colors of the ocean—the same elements I love about my home in Gloucester. As far apart as they are, each place has helped me see the other—more often contrasting though at times reminiscent.
Waring was born in Sante Fe, NM of a French mother and an American father. She grew up with French as a first language and spent her early years in Florence and Paris. Her family settled in Rockport, MA, where, in 1972, her parents founded La Petite Ecole- (now The Waring School).
She graduated from Princeton University in 1988 with a BA in Art History and Visual Arts. That summer she made her first trip to Provence and fell in love with it. In the 20 years that followed Rokhaya spent part of every year in the medieval village of Forcalquier, painting and exhibiting her work. She has also painted in England, Italy, Greece, Scandinavia, Israel, Martinique, French Polynesia and throughout the United States. In 2008, Rokhaya returned to Cape Ann (where she is a member of The Rocky Neck Art Colony) to live and work.
Waring's bold colors and vigorous brushstrokes have prompted comparisons to European Impressionists. Her paintings have been exhibited in juried shows in Europe, the United States and are in many private collections worldwide. Some venues where her work has been shown include: the Copley Society of Art in Boston, MA, the Salon Des Artistes Français and the Salon d'Automne in Paris, and the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire.
A reception for the artist is this Saturday, Sept. 3, from 6-8 pm at Rocky Neck Gallery. Please join us, meet the artist and travel the exotic world through her colorful paintings.
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