About the artist

Materese Roche does not surround herself with traditional forms of art. Instead, you are likely to discover an old, ornate fence surrounding the staircase in her studio or an antique carnival game board hung proudly on a dining room wall. But more surprising than these reinvented treasures is Materese herself. Like the large wooden gear in the entrance of her house, Materese was once a working part in the machine of corporate America.

After a long and successful business career, she made the decision to paint full time and has yet to look back. As a child, Materese remembers pouring through art books and being entranced with two telling paintings, Thomas Gainsborough’s, The Blue Boy, and Pierre Renoir’s, Dance at Bougival. One painting powerfully representational; the other emotionally stirring: a combination she would strive to mesh as an adult artist.

Classically trained in highly representational art, Materese understands and considers all of the technical aspects of painting one learns as a student, yet in her work there is a luminosity that is impossible to teach. Her decidedly crisp and technical still lifes seem in direct contrast to her atmospheric whispery landscapes. Materese’s abstract paintings are the result of a creative experiment. In her studio is a piece of old weathered copper, which inspired her first abstract painting. The copper is covered in a deep blue-green patina and is sliced with veins of red rust. Alone, the copper scrap seems inconsequential; however, held next to the painting one is able to understand, to an extent, the way the world impacts Materese and her artwork.

To Materese, it is not about painting the still life as she sees it or capturing the meadow at a specific moment, instead her interest lies in the essence of these subjects. She is fascinated by the minutiae of angles, as well as the contrasts between the clarity and blur of nature. She seeks to incorporate all of her senses into her paintings; the feeling of air on her skin, the smell of salt air, the quiet in her studio, and it is this integration that makes her work distinct.

In a world where so much mystery has been explained and technology encroaches upon us, Materese has a clearness of vision that lets her continue to search, not for the answers, but for universal truths. It is through her paintings that one can discover what she has found.

Read the artists resume