Yvette Neumann is a prolific Northwest artist whose paintings incorporate aspects of surreal, figurative, and abstract art styles in works of contemporary modern art. Yvette works primarily in oil, acrylic, and ink but also enjoys experimenting with nontraditional materials and other aspects of mixed media work. Originally from South Africa, the pursuit of a more simplified life is what propelled Yvette to step away from a thriving aerospace career and take up painting seriously in 2007.  Her passion for art, combined with years of technical expertise and training, allows her to reveal in her work, the fusion of practical leanings with expressions of aesthetic beauty.  Yvette’s work is featured regularly at fine art galleries, museums, and other select venues in Washington.

Yvette draws ideas from daily life, objects, moods, and physical features not so much because of what they are, but because of the questions they inspire.  Working a typical 9 to 5 day in her studio, she constantly works and reworks paint and finish formulas, spending many crucial hours trying new things – creative endeavors that echo the spirit of invention and imagination she believes are principals of self-awareness.

Yvette typically extracts imagined circumstances from real subjects when conceiving compositions, drawing ideas from plant life, rock formations, moving water, animal features and the like.  But what she’s really striving for is to connect the untrained beauty of nature and natural forms with corporeal associations familiar to everyone:  the way a ridge line on a hill can infer the arch of a woman’s back; the way a shadow cast in just the right manner can suggest a bird’s wing stretched in flight.  Seeing continuity in disparate things and being able to express that relationship without constraint is what attracts her to abstract painting styles.  Yvette’s work is the result of ideas and impressions about her personal life journey thus far, with each new painting culminating private thoughts and inner conversations about the basic iterative nature of change: all things are devolving into something else.

“My work is generally non-representational, allowing individual responses and interpretation.  Abstraction appeals to me because the process allows translation of thoughts and flashes of insight to be made physically real without the burden of qualification and traditional controls found in other conventional styles of art.  Each time I embark on a new work, each foray has its own set of problems to solve, processes to perfect, ideas to explore.  I paint with the hope that my next painting will be my best painting so far.” – Yvette Neumann