“Life is an illusion…or a reality.  We are the sum total of our life’s experiences.  How we choose to ‘react’ or think about these experiences becomes the basis of our character or personality.  And so it is with art.  It is simply the creative expression or ‘reaction’ of a person’s so called reality.

Reality for me is in the knowing of a Supreme Intelligence and finding continually new and different proof of it through our natural world.  More and more I find that my work is a reaction to the effects of light I experience in the physical world.  I find that it reveals such beauty to us. Without light there is no visible world.  It has the ability to transform the ordinary, lifeless or dull, into something magically exciting, and spiritually-enlightening that becomes an awe-inspiring experience to one who sees it. 

It is in this, the light, that I find never-ending inspiration, to put down on canvas my individual expression or celebration of life.  It is the process of living and learning, seeing and painting, which becomes my reality of our world.  It is my life’s goal to humbly share my experience and to evoke within the viewer the possibility of seeing the outside world from within, both through my reality and their own.” – Deborah Cotrone

Connecticut resident Deborah Cotrone uses her familiarity and love of the New England countryside as her muse.  She absorbs the richness of the changing foliage, sparkling waterfronts and meandering meadows, transferring her visual inspirations into vibrant impressionist renderings.  Cotrone translates what her eyes and mind experience with swift, deft brushstrokes, depicting the ever-changing light and atmosphere that typify a New England landscape.  She works to create a mood in her paintings, a romanticized view of the world which is warm, inviting and infused with color and light.

Cotrone has recently found inspiration in the works of Russian painters Sergi Bongart (1918-1985), Ilya Repin (1844-1930) and Nikolai Fechin (1881-1955), as well as the American master John Singer Sargent.  With each new painting, she seeks to achieve higher levels of sophistication by “saying more with less,” giving her works a poetic quality.