In her lushly colored, expressive prints and paintings, Helen Cantrell focuses on landscape and suburban scenes, and the people who appear in these often sparsely populated places. She was inspired to make art at the age of 13, when she came across an article about Richard Diebenkorn and the Bay Area Figurative Art painters. These influences are apparent in her works, which feature a mix of abstraction and figuration, rich, bright hues, visible brushwork, and sense of calm. In some of her compositions, a few carefully positioned bands of color create a view of an open landscape, as in Narragansett Yellow in which swaths of yellow, orange, and violet-gray evoke paths and fields. Other works—such as John and Joyce Backyard (2012)—are more descriptive and feature sketchily rendered human figures or neat subdivisions.
