Featured image: Oracle, Trish Klenow, 2024, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in. / 76.2 x 60.96 cm.
Trish Klenow’s paintings Long View (2021), Recovery (2026), and A Charming Lad (2023) explore psychological states through surreal figuration and symbolic landscape.
Trish Klenow is a painter whose surreal figurative and landscape works explore perception, memory, and emotional transition through subtle distortion and symbolic imagery.
Working primarily in oil, Klenow blends recognizable forms with subtle distortions that suggest memory, perception, and emotional transition. Figures and environments are treated as interconnected spaces, where internal experience reshapes external reality. Across these works, the familiar becomes quietly unsettled, inviting prolonged contemplation rather than immediate resolution.
Long View, Trish Klenow, 2021, oil on canvas, 28 x 22 in. / 71.12 x 55.88 cm.
In Long View, a woman in a blue dress stands before a layered mountain landscape, her face partially obscured by drifting clouds. The interruption of the figure’s identity by atmospheric elements suggests the erosion or concealment of self over time. Cool blues and greens dominate the palette, reinforcing emotional distance and introspection. The composition balances solidity and dissolution: the body remains grounded while the head merges with the sky. This visual tension evokes memory and perspective, how experience blurs clarity while expanding awareness.
Recovery, Trish Klenow, 2026, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in. / 76.2 x 60.96 cm.
Recovery presents a surreal marshland landscape bisected by a winding river, upon which a bed floats improbably at the center. The bed functions as a symbol of vulnerability, rest, and healing, displaced from its domestic setting into an open, exposed environment. Klenow’s use of yellow grasses and cerulean water creates chromatic contrast that energizes the scene without overwhelming it. The serpentine river suggests ongoing movement and uncertainty, while the bed implies pause. Together, these elements frame recovery as a process that unfolds within instability rather than after it.
A Charming Lad, Trish Klenow, 2023, oil on panel, 10 x 8 in. / 25.4 x 20.32 cm.
In A Charming Lad, Klenow depicts a young boy with four eyes set against an aqua background. The doubled eyes immediately disrupt naturalism, suggesting heightened perception or divided awareness. Soft modeling of the face contrasts with the uncanny alteration, lending the figure an unsettling calm. The limited background isolates the subject, directing focus toward internal cognition rather than environment. The work reads as a meditation on perception, how seeing more does not necessarily bring clarity, but instead complicates understanding.
Taken together, these paintings articulate a central concern with altered perception and inner navigation. Klenow’s figures and landscapes exist in states of transition, where identity, memory, and recovery are fluid rather than fixed. Clouds obscure faces, beds drift through wetlands, and eyes multiply, each gesture signaling that psychological experience reshapes reality. The unifying theme across the works is quiet transformation: moments where change is ongoing, unresolved, and deeply human.
Learn more About Naturalist Gallery of Contemporary Art.
TK02-Firefly, Trish Klenow, 2020, oil on canvas, 32 x 22 in. / 81.38 x 55.88 cm.
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