“The Source contains and is born of the collective truth of humanity. It receives from the individual’s experience and gives to the individual’s nature.” –from ‘The I Ching’

Oil painter Emily Palmquist lives and works on Placerville, Colorado’s Specie Mesa, with a dramatic view of the surrounding San Juan Mountains and a rotating cast of fauna and flora – both wild and tame. Nestled among scrub and piñon, and visited by ravens, coyotes, and other creatures, her remote hilltop home is an integral character in both her artistic practice and the substance of her work.

Palmquist’s studio practice functions as a framework for introspection and a mode for processing her life experiences. Her paintings explore a complex inner landscape populated with the collected relics of an outer voyage. Recurring patterns and poignant abstraction are judiciously employed alongside her obvious knack for realism, working together to visually embody the ongoing conversation between her internal and external worlds. 

Her composite scenes are developed through a non-linear process of synthesizing insights and experiences into a visual language that can articulate both the harmony and mystery of what Palmquist can describe only as her spiritual journey. Guided by the rhythms of nature and shaped by a practice of mindfulness, meditation, movement and therapy, her work examines themes of healing and personal inquiry through these narrative tableaus. Her paintings invite the viewer into surreal but recognizable landscapes, where the familiar comingles with the projected, the past, the day-dreamed, and other realms on the edge of imagination.

“My compositions intend to give visual name, voice, and loving awareness to core human experiences such as grief, shame, resilience, scarcity, empathy, transience, joy, and suffering - to name a few - offering up my individual example in hopes of contributing to a fuller spectrum of representation for what are often the hushed and isolated moments of our humanity.”