Peter Roux and Sarah Mathilda Stewart are two artists who consider the material and metaphysical vastness of matter, water, and light through distinctly different constructs. Both make gemlike paintings that move within and outside the edges of their wood substrates as orchestral movements unfurl within vivid matrixes.
Rainbow Spirits, Sarah Mathilda Stewart’s first solo exhibition, is largely informed by her years of experience studying and working with the healing properties of plants, along with extensive knowledge of the Tarot. Her surfaces are executed with precision in a language honed from years of practice, with the grain of the panels often visible under gauzy translucent glazes embellished with prisms of vivid color rendered in acrylic, paint and ink markers, and colored pencils. Snakes, figurative elements, dotted strands and spirals of light, droplets, rainbows, and rivulets form sinewy arcs and patterns.
Sarah Mathilda Stewart is a self-taught painter who started as a professional muralist 15 years ago. Her recent work integrates sacred geometries, softness, botanical healing, subtle energies of flowers, and her own higher intuition. A pivotal experience for her involved healing through plant medicine after a devastating postpartum experience. Through the guidance of a woman named Becky Crowell, who gave her a Tarot reading and introduced Sarah to flower essences, she went to Berkeley and studied flower therapy at the Bach Institute.
“Symmetry creates its own world”, explains Stewart. “I get a lot of messages from my subconscious or higher consciousness. Whatever it is, I am not thinking about it. It just comes out. She was influenced early on by the writings of Carl Jung about archetypes. The flowers have become a fusion of many things for her, a form of divine essence through which she has understood living beings, soul energy, and death in a completely different way. These works, most of which will be included in a Tarot card deck to be published in 2025, are centered around honoring the flower by painting altars to the flowers. Queen of Wands: Yarrow, Willow, Oxeye Daisy presents an eye in the center of everything, as well as another in the eye of a daisy, flanked by willow and yarrow and two snakes intertwining, conjuring the caduceus carried by Hermes in Greek Mythology, with deeper roots traced to Sumer (Southern Iraq), Ancient Egypt and India. Above the snakes, a rainbow rises, linking them. The Queen of Wands Tarot card signifies a strong, joyful, courageous feminine energy. Warmth is intrinsic to this card, as are passion, creativity, and self-awareness- and traditionally, a female figure, flower-crowned, with a tamed lion in a lush summer garden. Stewart’s painting eschews the human figure and is bathed in golden-brown glazes, shimmering white orbs, and strands of water. There are more details- a golden sun, a pyramid, rays radiating. The placement of everything feels deeply intentional and significant. The mood is deep and soft, which is an effect of the translucency of the paint juxtaposed with delicate precise rendering of everything in the space. This is one of the more peaceful paintings in the exhibition. In others, geometric structures overlap and collapse, pulling the eye into deep vistas and then back to the surface. Neon pinks and ocean blues proliferate, as do ghostly fantastical dragons, serpents and unicorns.
Intention, fearlessness, and laser-like focus resonates from the works that comprise Rainbow Spirits. Each one is a universe unto itself, and they link together like pages of an ever-unfolding book that reveals new secrets with each encounter.
Sarah Mathilda Stewart
Queen of Wands: Yarrow, Willow, Oxeye Daisy
2018
acrylic, oil pen, and colored pencil on wood panel
“Images are not the things they represent, yet our relationship to them informs our daily experience of the world”, Peter Roux explains in a recent interview. “I'm especially drawn to subjects in nature that are subject to constant change...things that are never still- clouds, water, etc. It's a bit of a paradox that I pursue these in what is often considered a relatively static medium, but I find that paradox compelling.”
Roux has been making art for decades, having gotten a BFA and MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art where he started in illustration and then quickly gravitated towards painting Luminous and detailed swells of ocean surf, cumulonimbus clouds, and softly atmospheric countryside scenes comprise the paintings in always elusive, continually shifting. There, lusciously rendered imagery overlaps into occasional Cy Twombly-esque gashes of paint, while vivid electric hues occasionally appear in intensity bands, like glitches produced by color printers when they run out of ink. Ranging in size, Roux works with rectilinear formats, tondos, and, most recently, multi-faceted cubic and columnar wood constructions with multiple painted facets. He utilizes a potent and limited palette for each painting, working with glazes and scumbles of paint, always returning to water as a shape-shifting muse.
Myths of Another, the largest painting in the exhibition, comprises three panels hung closely together. The outer two feature clouds against inky and electric blue, while the middle smaller panel is inserted like an abstract slice. The juxtaposition is more like a flow state or an encounter in nature. It takes some time to recognize the radical shift out of rendered imagery on the narrow green panel joining the two cloud visions. Roux brings an elegant sense of design throughout his work, along with an uncanny ability to quickly and boldly shift from tight rendering to a muscular gestural painterly language that brings awareness to the surface. The massive size of this painting, along with the clouds viewed as if they are above us, takes the experience of this work out of gravity and into a sense of floating while being comfortably anchored. Air and light are palpable in a way that is more immediate and deep than realist paintings of horizoned landscapes. Roux invites us to commune with clouds and water in a trans-spatial way.
Peter Roux
Myths of Another
oil on panel
48” x 120"
Alongside these pungent, swelling visions, another body of work based on the heady atmosphere and green fields experienced in the Cotswolds in England, where he spent some time painting and absorbing the astounding landscape. “I'm also, as we all are, a product of my time...and my time in history includes exposure to tv, film, photography, and, ultimately, images on screens throughout each day. I began to realize I had a deep interest not only in natural spaces, but in how we take in images in our culture- how our sensibilities have been informed by the continuous exposure to images.. Images are windows representing things, asking us to suspend our disbelief as we buy into their presentations of depth and space. Even the shapes and sizes of the windows themselves are up for manipulation, defining for us what and how we will see what is offered”, writes Roux. Quietly engulfing, these cool and clarifying orchestral visions, neutralizing the clutter of mental chatter and offering a strangely satisfying obliteration.
About the Artists
Sarah Mathilda Stewart received a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the College of Charleston in 2005 and studied Flower Essence Therapy at the Bach Centre in Mount Vernon, England, in 2014. She is a self-taught painter who sells her paintings and prints through a massive following of collectors and admirers, many of whom follow her on Instagram under Rattlesnakes and Rainbows. Stewart has had numerous public and private mural commissions in North and South Carolina, Los Angeles, and Illinois. Her work is published in Plant Magick from the Library of Esoterica series (Taschen, 2023) and on Chancha Via Curcuito (Pedro Canale) album covers. She was featured in the Charleston Voyager (2022) and the Art Wilderness Mystic blog (2022). Currently living in Charleston, South Carolina, Stewart is relocating with her family to Marshall, North Carolina later this month.
Peter Roux lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina. He received both a BFA and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts. His work has been featured twice in New American Paintings (volumes 20 and 38). His work has been widely exhibited at venues including Alan Avery Art Company (Atlanta, Georgia); Van Rensburg Gallery (Milton, Australia); Lyons Weir Gallery (New York, NY); Miller White Fine Art (Dennis, MA); Etherington Fine Art (Martha’s Vineyard, MA); Mike Wright Gallery (Denver, CO); Hemphill Fine Arts (Washington DC); The DeCordova Museum; Federal Reserve Gallery, Jules Place, and Neiman Marcus (all in Boston, MA), Mark Bettis Gallery and Blue Spiral Gallery (Asheville, NC), among many more. Selected corporate collections include the US Department of State, Fidelity Investments, Ritz-Carlton Hotels, Hilton Hotels, Gregory Simmons Group, Four Seasons Hotels, Meditech Corporation, and Marriott Hotels.
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