Yozelin Rivera’s landscape paintings offer a contemplative gaze into stillness, light, and memory.
Yozelin Rivera paints serene, light-filled landscapes that explore memory, mood, and place through a realist yet introspective lens.
Working in acrylic and gouache, Rivera captures the nuanced atmospheres of familiar environments, the moonlit river, the reflective lake, the snow-draped tree, rendering them with reverence and restraint. Her work invites viewers into intimate moments with the natural world, balancing realism with poetic subtlety. Each work is a study in quiet power, where the landscape becomes not just seen, but felt.
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Moonlight on The James, Yozelin Rivera, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 20 in. / 60.96 x 50.8 cm.
In Moonlight on The James, Rivera turns the night sky into a rich meditation on depth and silence. Deep blue and charcoal tones bleed into one another, while soft moonlight hovers above the river’s horizon, illuminating the water just enough to suggest life beyond the shadows. The brushwork in the sky evokes movement and mood, while the reflective surface of the James River becomes a tranquil counterpoint. Small dots of light along the distant shore anchor the scene in reality, even as the overall composition flirts with the surreal. It’s a nocturne for the senses, solitary, expansive, and reflective.
Oak Grove, Yozelin Rivera, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 20 in. / 60.96 x 50.8 cm.
Oak Grove stands in bright contrast to the moonlit stillness of the previous painting. Here, daylight fills the canvas, casting crisp reflections onto the water’s surface. The work’s compositional clarity draws the eye across the mirrored shoreline, where soft clouds roll above a stretch of foliage. Rivera’s use of color, earthy greens, soft blues, and bright whites, offers a visual breath, almost cinematic in its composition. While seemingly straightforward, the painting evokes a deeper serenity rooted in observation: the quiet dignity of trees, the humility of shadows, and the constancy of place.
After Snowfall, Stillness, Yozelin Rivera, 2025, acrylic and gouache on canvas, 24 x 18 in. / 60.96 x 45.72 cm.
Rendered in monochrome with delicate gouache highlights, After Snowfall, Stillness captures a frozen moment both literally and emotionally. A towering pine looms in the foreground, textured with patches of snow. Telephone wires slice across the composition, grounding the scene in suburban reality. Yet, the grayscale palette and hazy background soften the image, suggesting memory or dream. Rivera’s technique here merges documentary precision with poetic impression, an ode to the quiet that arrives after a storm, and the strange stillness that coats everything in its wake.
Across these three works, Rivera reveals the beauty in stillness, whether through a moonlit river, a sunlit lake, or a snow-laden tree. Her restrained palette, sensitive handling of light, and compositional intimacy all point to an artist attuned to the sacred rhythms of the everyday. Rivera doesn’t shout her message; she whispers it across water, through branches, and between clouds. Together, these paintings form a portrait of place as memory, a quiet world that continues to unfold.
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