Cheryl McAlister

Artist Statement

I am a painter working in acrylic and chalk pastel. My subject is the landscape of Maine and northern New England: water, stone, forest, and the shifting light between them. I begin with close observation and move quickly toward simplification, making structural decisions about what to keep, what to flatten, and what to leave out.

My deep connection to the land began when I was farming in Central Vermont from 2007 to 2016, working the same ground through every season. That experience continues to shape how I see light, weather, and change in the landscape I paint. Today, I live and work in Maine.

I work from a deliberately limited palette: burnt umber, Payne’s gray, phthalo blue, benzimidazolone yellow, quinacridone magenta, and titanium white, on a consistent square format. These restrictions force decisions. A few pigments, mixed and layered, have to carry every color in the painting. The square, the most neutral of formats, favors no direction, so every compositional choice I make must be deliberate.

All of these limits serve one question, which stays the same while my subjects change: how far can a painting be pushed toward pure form before it can no longer say “this place,” and how do I find that edge without crossing it? Lately I have come to ask it through the beautiful and the overwhelming: boulders that tower, water that goes dark, places that are lovely and unsettling at once.

BFA, Rhode Island School of Design, 1984. MFA, Vermont College of Fine Arts, 2002.

Taught painting and drawing for twenty-six years, including as Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the New England Institute of Art, 2001 to 2011.