Set intimately in the new Roberto Russell gallery space with a view of the bay, collectors are invited to disappear into the watery vistas created by Camilla Webster, emerging with a renewed sense of peace.
“Keys Kintsugi” is a new body of work inspired by the artist’s healing experience in the Florida Keys and her family’s century old great love of the area’s oceans and environment.
Drawing from the Japanese art of kintsugi, splashes of gold meander through each painting. In kintsugi pottery, imperfections and cracks are accentuated and celebrated with a gold overlay allowing the flaws themselves to shine through, suggesting that there is new beauty and increased value not only in the cracks of pottery, but in the cracks of life itself. This work was inspired by a time of loss and renewal in the artist’s own life but also by the devastation and recovery of a community after Hurricane Irma. Webster’s message is to declare that life is always beautiful, even in the realms of great tragedy, and that art has the power to heal. From October to December of this year, Webster’s complete Keys Kintsugi collection will be exhibited in Islamorada at Ocean Sotheby’s Roberto Russell Gallery.
Webster’s abstract paintings of the sunset on Card Sound, Peacock Dusk over the mangroves, The Clouds Are Our Mountains over the highway and the ocean’s surface in The Symphony of Water prompted famed artist and art writer Bruce Helander to write “the artist’s most memorable and ingenious compositions possess a certain mystifying spirituality placed between the painterly lines that often seem dreamlike in an elusive abstract recreation of a special moment in time that’s worth documenting. Webster has an innate ability to install invisible emotional gestures that seem to float and then seductively recede like the tide into provocative abstract arrangements.” Comparing his experience of visiting the work to that of his visits to Olitsky, Poons and Zakanitch in the 1980s, he writes, “Camilla Webster has developed a new body of work that strongly suggests she has joined a distinguished professional fraternity of the next generation of talented artists inspired by the Florida Keys.”
Painting from the heart her artwork not only depicts her passion and sensitivity but also her desire to educate. Her philosophy is that “art has the ability to grab our attention, to emanate the human condition.” She is a teacher. She is an artist. She is a healer inviting you to decelerate and find peace and hope in her work. As she says in her Ted Talk, Art in Front of You, “look up, look down and all around and let art change your life.” And she speaks from experience.
Webster’s acrylic on canvas paintings use color, energy, and movement to also remind us that we are one with the element of water and that we need it to grow, to heal, to cleanse, and to renew. “We are all water, we share global waters, and the water in the paintings is also a reflection of our emotional wellbeing,” she says. The intention of her work is to bring a sense of solitude and tranquility to all who view it. The exhibition will showcase eleven new works will at Ocean Sotheby’s in Islamorada beginning in October through the end of the year.