Cena Pohl Crane
Cena Pohl Crane is an oil painter based in Margaretville, New York. After a thirty-year career in digital design, she relocated from Brooklyn to the Catskills to rededicate herself to a full-time studio practice. She received her BFA in painting at Washington University in St. Louis, which included a semester studying art history and painting in Florence Italy, cementing her love of figurative art. She is typically found in her studio upstairs from the Longyear Gallery in the historic Commons Building, where visitors are welcome to view her latest work. Her paintings have been exhibited regionally and in Brooklyn.
As a painter, my process is one of discovery rather than documentation; I do not work from life or photography. Instead, I begin by making spontaneous marks on the canvas then respond by interpreting this chaos, pulling figures out or pushing landscapes back, responding to the feeling that the emerging shapes elicit. This method allows me to give form to unrecognized and unspoken feelings. In a painting’s early stages, I have no preconception of what it should communicate. Instead, the image discloses subconscious meaning through the act of creation, often revealing themes of melancholy, anxiety, or the uneasy comfort found between figures. For me, painting is a way of making sense of a fractured world—a process of healing—in the hope that a viewer will pause, look, and find comfort in a shared emotional experience.