About

Cheryl Yaney eloquently interpreted the natural landscape applying her lifelong fascination with the geometry and spatial illusions of the physical world. Along with this intellectual inquisitiveness, Yaney's paintings exhibit an equally important element of passion and movement, greatly inspired by her love of dance and movement in her daily life.

She used both subtle and complex color to transmit vitality in her works on paper and on canvas. Playful shapes and characters inhabit illusions of water, air, sea and fields of color, which often suggest several perspectives and vistas at once. Because the artist had a personal affinity with airborne creatures, (suggesting a bird's-eye-view) there are evocations of flora and fauna, planetary shapes and, naturally, birds.

Cheryl Yaney studied with some of the great Bay Area artists of the generation before her (Nathan Oliveira, Frank Lobdell), incorporating their lessons while nonetheless avidly manifesting her own particular expressions. Her paintings are alive with movement and energized paint surfaces that are balanced within formal compositions -it is precisely this duality of symmetry and her genuine and spiritual use of color that awakens the soul and the imagination.                  

Cheryl Yaney  (1953-2012)

--Carlos Rojas, San Francicso, 2004