East of the Sierra
Veronica Diament
Sierra Arts Gallery
Reno
Jan. 2 – 27, 2024
Honestly, there are few better places to see visual art in Reno than the Sierra Arts Gallery in the old Riverside Hotel. The stark, concrete space accentuates the art hanging on its walls. And the natural light, plus the soft jazz playing in the background on this particular visit, sets a chill vibe for considering pieces. It’s a space that encourages you to take your time.
That time is well-spent in appreciation of Veronica Diament’s new show East of the Sierra at the Sierra Arts Foundation’s gallery by the river. The show, which contains oil paintings on canvas, runs through Jan. 27. It’s a small collection split into two halves. One set of paintings capture large mountain landscapes. The other half focus on singular flowering plants.
Diament’s technical brushstrokes, diverse in type for differing effects, stood out immediately to me. The first canvas to catch my eye, “Pine Nut Highlands,” featured short strokes to show movement in the foreground’s dark green, windblown trees. To the viewer’s eye, it seemed as if the wind was blowing from all directions at once and twisting the trees every which way.
In “Rabbitbrush Foothills,” Diament employs little earthy green dots to capture tiny trees way up on a faraway dusty mountain hillside. They hint at one of the main themes of the exhibition for me: The vastness of the Basin and Range that sits east of the Sierra and west of Utah’s Wasatch Front. Each of those small dots represents a big, living tree integral to the ecosystem around it. But from the vantage point of the painting, we can only guess what natural treasures exist all the way up there.
Diament’s talent can also be seen in the smaller close-up flora portraits. While a viewer’s eye might be drawn to the vivid purples and blues that make up the hanging flowers in “Butterfly Batch,” the texture of the plant’s leaves is exquisite. Diament beautifully layers bright and dark greens to produce lifelike spots of light and shadow on the leaves. She gets the essence of what a leaf even feels like.
Another thing that stood out to me were the white, uneven borders Diament created by leaving much of the edges of her canvases blank. They help to focus the eye of the viewer. Perhaps more importantly, Diament often broke up those borders by painting additional plants in the foreground. For example, returning to “Rabbitbrush Foothills,” the eponymous shrubs stretch all the way to the lower left corner of the canvas, completely blotting out the white border. For me, that recalls the endlessness of the Great Basin, the never-ending, but oft-threatened, Sagebrush Sea.
Even in “Spring Skiing,” which is a hybrid of the two sets of subjects on display in this show, the spindly branches of a pine tree wrap around the canvas, hinting that there’s something, maybe a bird perched on a branch, hidden from our view.
Another way Diament elevates her Great Basin subjects is by placing them on light blue and gray backgrounds. Visually, the neutral colors accentuate the vibrancy of the hills, leaves, and snow she focuses on. Much like the concrete accents in the gallery itself. It left me with a deeper appreciation of the rocky, desert landscapes that surround Reno and other Nevada towns. Diament gives those landscapes new life.
Her attention to detail in the smaller flora portraits, like “Paperwhite” and “Peachy Yarrow,” had a similar effect on me. Her paintings are studies in the structure of those plants. In “Paperwhite,” she even decides to include the dirty bulbs of the plants in her portrait, and therefore, highlights their importance to the life of each plant.
Those details and the monochrome backgrounds had me thinking that Diament is painting these mountain landscapes and plants as if they might disappear. And so, she has decided to create a compendium of these inspiring vistas and humble flowers so that we may remember them. Or, because of their beauty and necessity, we might decide to protect them after all.
What’s on at Sierra Arts Gallery: Virginia Dumas has a concurrent sculpture exhibition called Realizations running in the same space. In the back room of the gallery, Willow Cornelius also has a concurrent show called In Search of Light featuring her photographs of the Sierra.
What’s next for me: I’ll be moving to Salt Lake City at the end of the week and will continue filing reviews from there. It’s been great getting to know the Reno art scene better through these reviews and it has been an honor to write them. This city is full of artists doing amazing work, please support them.
