In oil on linen, Pedro Surroca confers his renditions of nature and landscapes with an ethereal light. His gentle and sophisticated color palette transports the viewer to an experience of peace and grace in nature, through representations of sweeping expanses of plains and mountains as well as depictions of plants and branches. Surroca’s work embraces the distinctive landscape of engaging places both in the American Southwest and in Spain. The vast planes and endless skies encountered in both locales appear subtly abstracted and, together with the absence of human form, accentuate the faraway and faintly mystical. Surroca creates a velvet-like sense of the earth’s gentle undulations and soft grass surfaces, a singular and striking element within his pictorial practice.His glittering monochromatic botanical series, rendered in gouache and copper powder on silk and paper, and newest series of presents intense, up-close perspectives of solitary dried leaves and empty branches. The artist demonstrates a unique reverence for these simple desiccated objects bestowing on them in the process of depicting their minute details an iconic-like significance reminiscent of the manner in which similar subjects were drawn by Albrecht Durer, for example, during the Renaissance. Though he utilizes a variety of styles, techniques and materials, all of Surroca’s works display an emotionally-laden and inspiring respect for the ineffable beauty of the natural world.Pedro Surroca was born in Kingston, Canada, but was raised in Colombia until age 14. He received a BA in Painting and Printmaking from Gonzaga University in 1985 and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY in 1988. Surroca lived and worked in San Francisco for 26 years; he now lives in New Mexico.