The Spaces We Share at Barns of Rose Hill
About the Artist: Tamara Lewis is a Clarke County, Virginia–based artist whose work explores the relationship between animals, people, and the environments they share. Working primarily in oil and cold wax, she builds her paintings through layered applications of color, using both intricate passages and simplified shapes to create form, movement,and visual tension.
Her subjects often center on animals and the subtle connections between animals and their human counterparts. Rather than pursuing strict realism, Lewis uses color,shape, and texture to evoke presence and atmosphere, allowing forms to emerge through their interaction, both up close and at a distance.
About the Exhibit: These works reflect an evolving direction in Lewis’s practice, exploring color, texture, and the relationships between subjects and their surroundings. Working in oil and cold wax, she builds form through layered applications of color—placing individual strokes and shapes that read as abstract up close, but come together into recognizable forms at a distance. In other pieces, she shifts toward larger, simplified shapes, allowing color relationships to define structure more directly.
Inspired in part by the Shenandoah region, Lewis returns to themes of animals, people, and shared experience. Her work often centers on the connection between animals and their human counterparts, using color and composition to create both structure and movement within the frame.
The inclusion of music-inspired imagery nods to the Barns of Rose Hill’s role as a space where art and music come together.
