Arlene Salomon, submitted artwork
Arlene Salomon
Painting
Maui, Hawaii
Arlene Salomon is a Hawai‘i-based artist, designer, and regenerative practitioner whose work explores impermanence, transformation, and collaboration with natural and man-made elements. Her current practice centers on painting and printmaking with natural pigments and light-sensitive materials that remain chemically active, creating works that shift in color, texture, and form over time. This approach continues a long history of experimentation across media, including fiber art, sculpture, alternative photography, and encaustic. Originally from New York, Arlene holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in Interior Architecture and Design. Since relocating to Maui nearly four decades ago, she has worked at the intersection of art and ecology, as a landscape designer, consulting arborist, and conservation advocate, allowing the rhythms of the natural world to shape her aesthetic and values. Her multidisciplinary practice now extends into residential and commercial interior design, where she brings the same sensitivity to materials, place, and environmental stewardship.
Works
Arlene Salomon, submitted artwork
I work with materials that respond to the elements- sunlight, saltwater, wind, precipitation and time. Using light-sensitive materials and foraged pigments on paper, I let the environment mark the work. Nothing stays fixed. Colors shift, textures emerge, forms continue to evolve long after they leave my hands, like a garden after it’s planted continues to change and grow. My background in landscape design and arboriculture taught me to work with living systems. That same understanding guides my studio practice. I don’t force materials to behave, I observe, adapt, and respond. The resulting forms speak to geologic and cosmic time, to forces larger than ourselves, and to the quiet, continuous act of seeing with the whole body.
