Pamela Granbery: Radiant States

Opening Reception: January 22, 2026, 5–6 p.m

Pamela Granbery (American, b. 1948) paints at the crosscurrents of color, light, and imagination. Working in watercolor and mixed media, she creates luminous, atmospheric fields where color behaves like light itself, energetic, shifting, and alive. Born of both accident and intention, her process recalls the spiritual experimentation of John La Farge’s stained glass and the dreamlike surrealism of Salvador Dalí’s landscapes.

Granbery approaches color as feeling. Pigment soaks, drifts, and breathes across the surface until form and space begin to dissolve. The rhythm of her life between Rhode Island’s ocean light and California’s desert glow gives her paintings a sense of place understood through mood rather than map.

Through these radiant states, she invites the viewer into the in-between, the moment when a painting hesitates before becoming whole.

A graduate of Bennington College and the Whitney Independent Study Program, Granbery was the first recipient of Hunter College’s combined media MFA and later taught Studio Design and Art History at RISD. Her work has been exhibited and collected in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston, bridging modernist experimentation with a sustained sensitivity to light, process, and perception. She has been a member of the Newport Art Museum for more than fifty years.