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Paul Sakren
1949-2022

Paul painted landscapes of dreams and visions that surfaced from some deep place, populated with magical trees and spirit creatures. For most of his life he had recurring dreams of magical mountains which are featured in his most recent series of works.

Rather than trying to paint traditional landscapes, Paul wanted to create a sense of the dream quality that these landscapes had for him. The pieces tend toward a certain impressionistic abstraction, with shapes, colors and strokes representing the energy of subliminal imagery and symbolic content. Each painting tries to capture a sense of the light at certain magical times: twilight, dawn, dusk, sunrise. moonrise, phases and alignments of sun and moon, those ‘cracks between the worlds’ when the two sides of awareness touch each other.

If there is a message or meaning in his works, it manifested only after he completed them. For Paul, each painting was a process of allowing imagery to suggest itself spontaneously, doing away with unnecessary and redefining the painting to meet his aesthetic goals of color, composition, and impact.

Paul lived in Northwestern Connecticut for most of his life, sometimes making second homes in San Francisco, CA, Cork, Ireland, and Glasgow, Scotland. His professional calling was as a landscape gardener and designer which allowed him to follow his other passion, painting, in the down months of winter. His experience outdoors in nature greatly influenced his paintings.

Paul’s father, Bill Sakren, was an artist, illustrator and professional cartoonist, and Paul grew up drawing and painting from age one.