Opening reception Saturday, September 8, 2-4 PM

Trina Sternstein studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, Italy, and the University of Iowa. She paints primarily in rural Massachusetts, and her paintings have been exhibited in galleries, libraries and auctions in the Massachusetts and New York area.

"My paintings derive from my observation of the world around me, and perhaps my inner world as well. It is in observation that one quickly recognizes that nature is both profoundly abstract and brilliantly articulated. I am keenly aware as I paint that my cognitive processes are oscillating between registering nature's abstraction and the unique and specific aspect of every element of it. But its underlying strength is most apparent when my eye attunes itself to the abstraction, the pattern, and the underlying organization of nature. Perhaps that is what I stress in my work, because as I paint I am making the profusion I observe abstract and comprehensible.

"It would distress me were a viewer to regard my work as only abstraction or as only landscape; ideally the viewer will be rewarded with a heightened sense of both ways of seeing. Abstraction is my way of making sense out of nature. It can bring order to seeming chaos and reason to inchoate structure. I strongly see abstraction not as simplification, but rather as articulation of complexity and intensity." --Trina Sears Sternstein