Phyllis Shafer Boxed Notecard Assortment
American plein air painter Phyllis Shafer attempts to reveal the rhythms and transcendental essence of nature through her landscape paintings. Inspired by the Lake Tahoe wilderness near her home, the Arizona deserts, and the majesty of national parks and forests, her scenes come to life with vibrant color palettes and stylized brushstrokes that bestow movement into seemingly still environments. Absorbing her unique point of view and flowing linework, the viewer of Shafer’s paintings can almost feel the breeze in their hair or the warmth of the sun on their skin. Let this set of four images carry you to a babbling brook, take on the perspective of a waltzing butterfly, or even provoke a moonlit adventure. Contains five each of the following notecards: Curious Clouds Surprised the Sky, 2019, Her Little Parasol to Lift, 2019, Swallowtail Dance, 2018, Moonrise over Stevens Peak, 2022.
• 20 blank notecards (5 each of 4 designs) with envelopes in a decorative box
• Printed in full color on FSC paper with soy based inks
• High-quality 250 gsm card stock
• Soft white envelopes
• Pomegranate’s notecard sets feature exclusive selections of art from museums and artists around the world
Card size: 7 x 5 in.
Nature, in its various manifestations, has always provided the raw material for my artistic investigations. Over the years I have explored a variety of styles and media - always with the natural environment as the focal point. As I have matured personally, my artistic sensibilities have similarly matured and evolved into an ever-deepening realization of my own private vision.
I believe that a kind of transcendental essence lies at the heart of all natural forms and objects. There is a concept in Zen Buddhist painting known as kiin-seido, meaning “living moment” or the immediate, intuitive expression of a subject’s essential nature. While I am not a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, I am interested in this concept as it relates to our experience of landscape. My artistic goal is, through the process of painting, to distill and crystallize that essence and the vital rhythms that animate it.
My method is to paint directly from the natural environment. This allows me to study my subject in its rawest incarnation and to better perceive and record the particular idiosyncrasies and beauty of the natural form. The unique qualities afforded by paint furthers the process of interpretation that hopefully brings about the necessary metamorphosis revealing the inner spirit of the subject. As a plein air landscape painter, I search for compositional arrangements that lend themselves to narrative possibilities. I am especially interested in the pantheistic quality of high altitude vistas juxtaposed to the intimate microcosm of the flora and fauna. These explorations of spatial extremes, for me, refer to the relationship between “world” and “self.” By probing beneath surface appearances, I try to reveal a nature that relates to bodily and psychological states of being.
