“Guralnick is training to be a master naturalist with the Forest Conservancy, specializing in lichen. This touch and slow-growing plant, she noted, can live for thousands of years. She has been studying deeply in science in recent years, continuing a career-long artistic inquiry into the natural world that she’s now girding with rigorous scientific training (last year she did a unique artists’ residency in a biology lab in New York).
Her deeply observed new work looks at the complex networks, symbiotic relationships and startling natural processes.
The show includes several large-format paintings of abstracted lichen forms. These works isolate the intricate patterns that lichen forms on rocks, hand-painted in acrylic, isolated against an juicy oil painting background. Anyone who has spent time in the local forests will recognize the patterns of the lichen and the shapes of local plantlife that surround it — crane flower pollen, horsetail and such. But few of us have looked as closely as Guralnick. On canvas, the lichen patterns look like tapestries.”