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     ALTHOUGH POSSELLI'S SCENES involve emotional responses to place--small-town Main Streets, ethereal skies, serene agrarian pastures--it is Utah's legendary, almost otherworldy geographical landscape that keeps here constantly engaged. "She goes past the point of painting pretty pictures," says Utah artist Kathryn Stats of her friends of 30 years. "She takes landscape to the next level, into another realm. Her pieces engage you viscerally, and everywhere your eye is led, you are rewarded for having made the trip."
     For instance, Posselli is a master at identifying how a single stroke of color can make a painting whole, Anderson point to her use of greens as an example: In cone painting, a spare highlight of cool thalo green sets a sandstone backdrop ablaze. "it's hard to capture the red-rock country without making it look unreal," Anderson remarks. "It's not the way an artist projects the reds; it;s the colors which are used to offset them that enhance the richness."

San Rafael, Utah Oil, 30 X 40

     Posselli by choice eschews a limited palette for one that gives her greater flexibility to respond to rapidly changing light conditions. The tubes in her arsenal include the standards plus a range of blues to better her greens as well as fiery Napthol Scarlet, Alizarin Crimson, mars and thio violet, burnt sienna, indigo for glazing, and ivory black.

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     A few years ago, during a desert hike-turned-sketching trip that led them through a dry riverbed, Posselli and a friend rounded a corner only to be left silenced by a bath of sunlight creating shadow within shadows as it reflected off the canyon walls. Posselli cannot explain in words how the encounter has affected her painting ever since, but a shift into more tonal abstraction is evident in a work that resulted from the foray, a piece titled SAN RAFAEL SWELL.
     She recalls, "I set up my paint kit, but [my friend] wasn't seeing what I was seeing. It appeared first and then disappeared, and then it reappeared again." As the sun shifted in the sky overhead, shadows located behind various clusters of rock turned red, and light began rising out ethereally like glowing, flaming rubies. "I was blown away," Posselli says. "But it seemed to confirm in consciousness what my eye had already known, that the most exciting energy in a painting often flows froth from shadow."
     Art historians who have seen her work not how it exudes the mystery which Dixon often willed into his Utah scenes, yet Posselli has brought a contemporary vibrancy. "I start seeing light in the form of color oozing from the rock's crevices. Each creature and bush and rock formation has a story of its own in this quiet land, and that is what I want to express," she explains.
     Scores of prominent painters have been drawn into the red rocks, though a Spartan few have gone beyond the clichés to understand the multiple layers of ambient, colorful abstraction that exist in the shadows of arches and erosion-slickened gullies and stark sandstone monoliths that exude a haunting spiritual presence.
     Posselli's plein-air studies mainly serve as accents to the memory of a place when she paints in the studio, and the geography itself serves as the architecture for emotion. " I try to soak everything in on location, knowing that in the studio the translation will come out differently," she say,s noting that she relies on her plein-air palette, rather than photographs, to identify the contrasts that set value.