OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, August 9, 5:00 - 8:00 PM

Sophie Treppendahl's newest solo show, Skinnydip Daydreams And A Striped Shirt, opens in Quirk's Pink Gallery on Thursday, August 9 and continues through October 14. 

I paint because I love the way shadows and light can completely change an object or a place. I want to capture that feeling of being temporarily overwhelmed by the thing in front of you - when it feels both otherworldly and ordinary.

I paint because I love the people around me and the way they make me feel. 

I paint the things I want to keep. The quiet at the river, the sun on my favorite shirt, the shadow on my best friends face. 

Through painting, I aim to capture not the likeness to an image but the overwhelming feeling of the space or a memory. In my studio, I work from recorded observations, often photographs and drawings, that then serve as a springboard to explore pattern, color, light and shadow. When creating, the representation becomes secondary, my primary focus becoming the painting process itself. As I translate reflection, pattern, and shadows through paint, the image lends itself to abstraction, manipulation and exaggeration. Through this, the painting takes on new life. And instead of creating a hollow representation of a moment that once was, I hope to create something altogether new - a painting imbued with the vibrance of that instance, the glow of how it felt, and the love of translating it through paint.

For this solo exhibition at Quirk, these works are my attempts to capture how summer feels. Not just in the general sense, but my summer, this one, here in Richmond, surrounded by the people and objects and make here home. These paintings are intimate and playful studies of the places and objects in my life and the way those very objects can completely transform it the late afternoon light and the moon shadows. For this show, I painted each of these moments more than once to explore the way the space transforms when described again through blue of night or a glowing pink haze. These works are hung side by side, inviting the viewer to experience these spaces in multiple ways.