Caryn Vainio
Caryn is a mixed media painter and printmaker creating energetic, bold paintings that interpret a sense of the Pacific Northwest landscape. She is drawn to the comforting closeness of the PNW’s mountain trails and the complexity of its coastlines and islands, finding inspiration over and over in the same places. "As a former scientist I employ the idea of wavelengths: my work focuses on conveying the wavelengths of the landscape that are hidden from the eyes but deeply felt. I believe painting is at its purest form when it conveys these hidden, personal wavelengths." Her acrylic mixed media paintings start with rough, invented compositions inspired by frequent time in the local Cascade foothills; building intuitively from there with energetic and active layering and mark-making. In contrast, her watercolor and ink paintings start with compositions inspired by a more expansive, cinematic, and distant view of the mountains and waterways of the Pacific Northwest coastline. With landscape as the initial foundation, the thread throughout all of her work is that of interference and disruption, particularly the disruption of the real and the organic by the unreal, the artificial, and the inorganic. These themes surface from her long career working in future-forward tech industries like games and virtual reality and how Caryn sees them layered over our physical reality, for better and for worse.
