The artwork of Cheryl Elmo captures the human experience through the simplicity of everyday moments.
Go Figure is a collection of Cheryl’s artwork that focuses on human connections, capturing something special in an otherwise ordinary moment in time.
These everyday moments made special will be featured in the main gallery of the Aiken Center for the Arts through November 30. Come and immerse yourself in the different perspectives awaiting you in this thoughtful exhibition.
Cheryl first picked up a paintbrush when she was 6 or 7 years old, and she has been painting ever since. She tried many other mediums but always came back to watercolors. She loves to see the water on the page — the differences in the colors enamored her, and she is still painting with watercolor today.
“Painting is my passion and fuels my happiness,” says Cheryl. She starts painting at 5 am and continues through the wee hours of the evening. What is important to her about her art is that she’s painting the human connection. “I am influenced by people in their momentary emotional interactions and challenged to tell their everyday life stories. Figures in my stories are anonymous and familiar, where I witness a moment and work to develop a relationship between the art and viewer,” explains Cheryl.
It’s about capturing a moment, an expression, and sharing the story of these anonymous characters, giving us a glimpse into another person’s perspective. She wants viewers to become a part of that story, to see something they would normally pass by, to appreciate the beauty of that moment.
An important turning point in her artistic career came years later with two serious episodes of cancer. She continued to develop her artistic resume with watercolor societies and local venue shows while fighting cancer with the same passionate drive she has for painting. Fully recovered, this experience influenced her devotion to capture each living moment by painting prolifically in her distinctive style while striving to communicate that each moment in life is a treasure.
Cheryl’s style and application of watercolor gives the medium a new and unique visual quality, with a balance of fluidity and structure. Her work is very distinctive — she puts down layer upon layer of paint, and as the work develops, figures and objects emerge with a puddle-like quality. This unique handling of the watercolor has evolved over the course of her life as a painter, creating an unusual style reminiscent of the Impressionists yet influenced by a modern-day edginess.
For the last decade of her artistic journey, Cheryl has had numerous single artist shows, been represented in multiple galleries, and received multiple awards while fine tuning the development of her contemporary approach to watercolor. She continues to build relationships in Bethlehem and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New York, and South Carolina while maintaining her signature status and gaining acceptance into prestigious shows.
