HOLMES BEACH – Each month, Island Gallery West displays the work of a featured artist prominently in the front window of the gallery, and October offers striking acrylic paintings by Charlotte Sorsen.
A Massachusetts native who relocated to Florida a decade ago, Sorsen uses bright colors to bring the Gulf coast to brilliant life with works of art that pull the eye into local flora, fauna and nature. Her display titled “Walking on Clouds” is a visual step into the beauty of Anna Maria Island and the Gulf coast she so dearly loves.
“These birds are a continuation of thought,” said Sorsen, speaking about birds in some of her paintings on display that seem to fly off the canvas. “They are birds, but they could be anything you would like them to be. When you take a picture of birds, you see parts of them, but they continue beyond the frame. That’s what I wanted to portray, the continued flight of whatever you want them to be in your mind. It could be the flight of your life, a flight of adventures; it could be anything you want it to be.”
Sorsen studied in Boston at the Museum School of Fine Arts and the New England School of Art and Design, using oil as her preferred medium in her early years as an artist, but later switching to acrylic for a very practical reason.
“I started with oil when I was considerably younger, then I had babies,” Sorsen said. “Acrylic paint was just starting to become a bit popular, but not really liked. I was painting on top of my washing machine at the time, and having small children around I was worried the toddler could pull the palate – which had turpentine and oil on it – off the machine; it was dangerous, so along comes acrylic paint and it just made sense.”
Like many area artists, Sorsen’s inspiration is drawn from her surroundings. She loves to paint nature, birds and other Gulf coast scenes with vivid oranges, blues, pinks and other colors she says just didn’t exist in her native Massachusetts. While she will always have a fondness for her native home, she has no desire to return to the north, where she says there is much more grey than the vivid colors that continue to inspire her in Florida.
Island West Gallery is located at 5368 Gulf Drive, Trolley Stop 15. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit the gallery website or call 941-778-6648 for updates.
