On Pamela Sukhum's Newest Paintings September 01 2026, 0 Comments
By Kimberly Nicoletti
Pamela Sukhum comes to the North Breckenridge location of Raitman Art Galleries the weekend of Sept. 4 to showcase her latest paintings, filled with luminosity, wonder and harmony.
By employing customized paint that took her 10 years to perfect so that it appears glassy and wet long after it dries — as well as sweeping brush strokes and intricate details — her paintings spring to life with vibrancy, dimension and a sense of movement.
Greatly inspired by nature, her pieces intuitively prompt viewers to see — and feel — human experiences in new ways. She transforms familiar elements, such as flowers, into fresh expressions, and she also translates the invisible to the visible.
For instance, one of her largest and most recent paintings, “Timeless Winds,” fills your entire field of vision when you stand in front of it. It measures 76 x 100 inches and pushes even her own boundaries, in terms of generating such an enormous and intricate piece.
Timeless Winds by Pamela Sukhum
“The idea with the size of it is really wanting to invite people into a new world of possibilities and the deeper mysteries of life,” Pamela Sukhum said.
The swirling lines — and energy — within “Timeless Winds” and many of her other paintings encourages the eye to travel around. She works very intentionally with curving lines, where one leads and bleeds into the other.
“In a way, it’s very Escher-like, in that you can’t tell whether a line is receding or coming toward you, and that’s done on purpose because it starts to open up perception and (help you) feel the vision, so you can’t just lock into resolving the piece right away, which I think is true of all of my pieces,” she said.
Just like nature, her paintings invite us into a place where our eyes move from one interesting detail to another, as well as into a contemplative space.
Inspiration for “Timeless Winds” emerged during a windy walk along a river near her Minnesota home. Rather than simply naming and dismissing the weather as “windy,” she took time to experience the wind caressing her skin “almost as if it trying to envelop me — as if it is whispering some ancient language carried from the ancestors — and from somewhere even further beyond.”
Though she might not cognitively understand what the wind is truly trying to say, she feels like her body knows, deep in her bones. And “Timeless Winds” reflects that feeling.
“Perhaps there are ways of knowing that don’t come through the intellect at all, but through the body, through intuition, through the wind against our skin … because the wind itself is timeless,” she says, noting that breezes swept across faces of those who came thousands of years before, and those who will come long after she’s gone. For her, the paradigm provides a sense of belonging within the vast continuum of life.
As strands intertwine throughout the sky within the painting, moving through and around each other, “they feel almost like visible currents of something that is normally invisible — the threads connecting us to memory, to ancestry, to one another and to the living earth.”
They move both independently and together, like all life on the planet.
Weaving, or braiding, has been a predominant theme in her paintings, especially lately. She spends her days painting and communing with nature, the latter of which completely regenerates her.
“Whether you’re a painter or not, that’s just life’s work — how we take these seemingly disparate strands of our life and braid them into a whole,” Pamela Sukhum said.
She’ll also showcase a new painting in her “Return to Joy” series, this time featuring hummingbirds. It’s one of the ways she reminds us to “discover deep, indestructible joy in life’s journey.”
Where Joy Abounds by Pamela Sukhum
Other new paintings come from the two series: “And They, Too, Loved” and “Azure Skies.”
The piece from “Azure Skies” honors the sense of joy beyond comprehension, which she especially experiences gazing at the vast skies above Western mountains, where stretches of blue make this human existence seem larger than life. It’s a celebration of awe, openness and extraordinary aliveness.
Luminous Horizons by Pamela Sukhum
“There is something about standing beneath a sky like that, that gives me a profound sense of freedom and possibility. The vastness outside of us seems to awaken a vastness within us — a reminder that we, too, are more expansive than the boundaries we sometimes place around ourselves,” Pamela Sukhum said.
Her previous career in cardiovascular health and electrophysiology led to the concept of weaving, and she continues to intertwine science and art, inner and outer, nature and self.
“There’s really no separation. It’s all so inextricably interwoven. For example, in ‘This Ecstatic Life,’ it looks like these brilliant colors of deep blue — a water and fire element. The movement could be perceived as wind or something more dynamic. But then you look closely at the reds, and it can be seen as within the body, almost like veins within the body, and it has a certain pulse to it when you stand close to it,” Pamela Sukhum said. “We spend so much time in our heads, but this life is very much within the body. And when we go into the body, we find that we’re made of the same elements that we see in the sky, in the earth, in the water.”
As a result, such paintings as “This Ecstatic Life” and “Wild Heart of the Mountains,” produced earlier this year, serve as visual — and visceral — meditations on our oneness with nature.
This Ecstatic Life by Pamela Sukhum
“That’s where the spark comes from. (There’s) a sense of ecstasy within our own lives (when) we really embody that spark,” she said. “This life, embodied, is quite ecstatic. We can feel it in the cells of our being.”
Her paintings continually offer uplifting, expansive and harmonious experiences that open us up more to curiosity, wonder and discovery.