California Coast near Monterey, #1 Painting

Paintings by Merrilee Drakulich are representational with a tendency toward abstraction. She has painted in oil on canvas and in oil pastels on paper for more than forty years. Her contemporary original paintings are derivative of the landscapes and seascapes of Ireland, France, Germany, Japan, and Jamaica as well as the U.S. Merrilee Drakulich was born and raised in the mountains and valleys of northeastern Pennsylvania, USA. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and her Master of Arts in Studio Art from California State University in Long Beach. Her paintings have been made available through exhibitions and art galleries throughout North America, the West Indies and Europe. Her involvement with the landscape began after her university studies, during the sixteen years she lived in Jamaica, West Indies. Intense Caribbean sunlight afforded her an opportunity to develop an interplay of light and shadows that became central to her work. Themes such as water, objects within the landscape, and views framed by windows dominated her work throughout the 1980's. Large areas of colors that reflect a minimal and abstract approach to the subject matter became dominant in her work. In the early l990's, she left Jamaica and accepted the invitation of Atkins Fine Art where she lived and painted the landscape of the Auvergne in south central France, noted for its vast areas of open spaces, golden sunlight and skies pressing down on the land. She eventually developed a personal vocabulary through her painting to express the complexities of the landscape. When traveling to Normandy, France, her first impression was of a sky and ocean with the most beautiful and ever-changing light she had ever seen. This provided her with two important elements for her paintings of Normandy - first the framed window view of the sky and the dark sea as viewed from the German block houses along the water - and second the light and colors of the sky which seemed to skip along the water. Besides the intense light, the sky was ever-changing. One minute it could be raining and the next minute beautiful clouds would build up along the horizon. After completing her first series of Normandy paintings, she decided to move away from the framework of the block house windows and focus on a series of paintings with borders to achieve a more abstract vision as if we are caught up in a moment of time.