MICHELE RAMIREZ
Open Fields
MICHELE RAMIREZ
Open Fields
February 4th – March 15th, 2025
Bryant Street Gallery is excited to present Open Fields, a selection of rich, sweeping landscapes by Michele Ramirez. This new exhibition revels in the boundless panoramas of central California, commemorating these familiar sights in sumptuous colors. Open Fields displays a deep connection with the land as well as with the communities that inhabit it. The exhibit is on display from February 4th to March 15th, 2025. The gallery and artist welcome the public to an opening reception on Saturday, February 8th, from 3-5 p.m.
Ramirez’s work, whether big or small, contains a vastness that any Californian will recognize. These paintings are distinctive for their sprawling, glassy skies: deep blue, overcast, or swathed in intricate clouds. The unending openness of the heavens reflects the land below, whose green and gold fields roll endlessly into the horizon. These are not wild meadows, but rather cultivated farmlands, whose angular plots bring to mind the many workers who till and tame the fields. Other paintings in this series feature more urban areas like South City, their buildings and roads rendered in the same loving familiarity, with sharp lines and angles mimicking the rectangular patchwork of the neighboring crops. They, too, sit beneath that grand blue sky, which seems to follow Ramirez wherever she goes.
Ramirez grew up in the rural farming community of the San Joaquin Valley. Her childhood was colored by the geometric planes and structures of the agricultural landscape, which shifted with the seasons and crop rotations in an ever-changing color palette. She was also shaped and inspired by the laborers who populated the area. Among them were her grandparents, who grew and harvested various crops and who encouraged Ramirez to follow her dream of becoming an artist. Crediting her work ethic to her familial roots, she paints daily, channeling the farming community of her youth into her art practice. In a previous series of prints, Ramirez highlighted the everyday tasks of the farmworkers, depicting them while planting, harvesting, digging, and resting. Open Fields celebrates these same people in a different way, honoring the land that they nurture, live full lives in, and are an integral part of.
Open Fields will be on view at 532 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301 from February 4th to March 15th. For more images and information please visit the website at www.bryantstreet.com or email us at bryantst@mac.com
Artist Statement:
I grew up surrounded by the natural color fields of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Crop rotations regularly presented different shapes and textures, and each season brought new colors in sections and rows. These geometric structures and planes that formed the wide-open landscape of my youth have always played strongly in my imagination and in my compositions.
Family ties frequently return me to the Valley, where I remain inspired by the relatively empty spaces plotted under large skies. They are a welcome contrast to the more complex blocks and lines of the city I now call home. The highways and roads slicing through all of these California landscapes divide and order space into the most elemental forms of drawing and painting. These lines and structures bear the weight of my compositions. Color ties them to emotion. In my paintings, elements of abstraction and formal structure are incorporated to lend ambiguity to the implied narrative of each piece. The story is left to the viewer.
Fields
