Featured image: Rutaceae, Emily Walley, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 11 in. / 35.56 x 27.94 cm.
Emily Walley’s acrylic paintings exist at the intersection of geology, design, and perception.
Emily Walley creates paintings that merge geological realism with abstract forms, exploring balance, perception, and material contradiction.
Her compositions blend natural textures, rock, water, earth, with flattened geometric planes and negative space, creating visual juxtapositions that feel both constructed and organic. With a keen sense of color and spatial tension, Walley challenges viewers to reexamine the familiar, from broken stone forms to refracted landscapes, through a lens of abstraction and subtle disruption. In Falls, Temporary, and Makeshift, Walley explores the fragility of balance, permanence, and environmental tension.
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Falls, Emily Walley, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 11 in. / 35.56 x 27.94 cm.
In Falls, Walley presents a sculptural illusion: a granite-like boulder precariously balanced with folded, glossy steel-blue shapes on a blush background. The forms appear weighty yet stylized, industrial yet delicate. The color contrast between the speckled texture of the stone and the reflective metallic blues draws attention to material friction, natural versus synthetic. Shadows and highlights are carefully rendered, heightening the sense of dimensionality. The composition explores balance and imbalance, hinting at collapse or construction. It's a meditation on physical gravity and conceptual contradiction.
Temporary, Emily Walley, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 in. / 101.6 x 76.2 cm.
Temporary scales up the tension, juxtaposing two monumental rock forms suspended in a field of pure blue. Each craggy shape is rendered with geological precision, layered striations, fractured edges, embedded snow, but they are dissected by minimalist diagonals and harsh cuts. The leftmost form reaches skyward like a cliff, while the right hovers ambiguously in space, grounded only by gridded abstraction. The piece asks what lasts, what is built, and what breaks away. The flatness of the background flattens time itself, framing the rocks not as landscapes, but as temporal interruptions, monuments destined to shift.
Makeshift, Emily Walley, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 24 in. / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.
In Makeshift, Walley returns to more traditional scenic cues, yet disrupts them with modern interventions. A pristine landscape, alpine lake, evergreens, mountain range, sits partially obscured by a hard-edged triangle overlay. At the base, a glass of water balanced on a rock becomes both still life and symbol. The triangulated forms pierce the scene like cutouts or portals, raising questions about mediation and fragmentation. Are we seeing the real or a reconstruction? In this work, Walley addresses how contemporary vision, shaped by digital and synthetic framing, interferes with direct experience.
Emily Walley’s paintings use form and fracture to question stability, perception, and human interference with the natural world. By splicing hyperreal textures with minimalist shapes and undefined negative space, she creates a visual push-pull between the constructed and the organic. These works aren’t just landscapes, they're meditations on impermanence, composition, and the fragile architecture of seeing.
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Landscape, Emily Walley, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 18 in. / 60.96 x 45.72 cm.
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