Stephanie Buer is known for her poignant, representational landscape paintings in oil, and charcoal works on paper. Combining the representational clarity and control of realism with the subtly perceptual handling of her medium. Her impressionistic treatment of light is imperceptible, but produces dramatic contrasts, while the immersive level of detail she realizes is staggering. These dark monochromatic works are labor-intensive documentations that seamlessly combine observational realism with extremely subtle, affect- driven stylization which make entry into the scenes she proposes physically palpable and intimately close.
The invasive quality of quiet that shapes Buer's contemplative works is unique; they are arresting in that they abruptly apprehend the passage of time. An evocative moodiness persists in her poetic compositional choices, immersive attention to detail, and her emotive capture of time and place. The works are honest in revealing the hand through the evident mark making in the work, using the abstract quality of marks and negative space to transform emptiness into fullness. It is a way of slowing down, becoming attentive and better knowing the world around her through drawing and painting, a language of both perception and sensation. The works are lovingly, and even painfully, precise in their lush detail and arrested stillness. They evoke a solitude and melancholy through the negative space, and sparse compositions, conveying the mindful calm of spending time in the natural world and also in the meditative practice of recreating these scenes in the studio in such an intimate and meticulous way. There is a gentleness and tranquility which invites the viewer into a slowing down, with a sense of solitude and wonder.
