“Sometimes the painting takes you somewhere more interesting than where you thought you were going.”
Landscapes Without Coordinates
Dawn Gellner paints places that seem familiar without surrendering their location. Mountains recede, landforms dissolve, water and trees surface through atmospheric passages, yet certainty remains deliberately out of reach. Her landscape paintings occupy a shifting point between observation, memory and invention, giving viewers enough visual information to enter while resisting a fixed interpretation. Distance, quiet and ambiguity are not simply subjects within the work. They shape how each painting is experienced, creating spaces that invite sustained attention rather than immediate recognition.
That sensitivity to landscape reaches back to a childhood spent moving between Japan, Germany and Hong Kong, followed by boarding school in Switzerland and the UK. One memory from adolescence remains especially vivid. Sitting alone beside Lake Geneva in Montreux, Gellner looked across toward the Dents du Midi and Dents de Morcles, overwhelmed by their scale. Far from home and struggling with anxiety, she experienced the mountains as both humbling and reassuring. Nature made her feel small, but its enormity also offered a form of comfort.
Images had already become a means of transportation for Gellner. She drew imaginary maps with a childhood friend, invented worlds populated by friendly monsters, and loved shadow boxes and small viewers that transformed landscapes into three-dimensional scenes. Swiss mountains and mountain passes were among the images she remembers. What captivated her was the sensation of entering a picture and being carried elsewhere. That early fascination persists in her attraction to piers vanishing toward horizons, narrowing roads and layered landscapes fading into the distance.
Dawn Gellner: Finding a Way Back to Painting
Becoming an artist was gradual rather than a single decisive turn. Gellner studied psychology in London and developed an interest in integrative health and natural medicine. After moving to Germany, she completed a three-year vocational qualification in jewellery and object design at the Goldsmithing School in Pforzheim. She later trained in counselling and clinical hypnotherapy and worked as a counsellor. Through these different directions, creative work continued to return. After marrying, having three children and settling with her family in Switzerland, painting increasingly became a place where she could find the quiet and space she craved.
She had painted intermittently for years, primarily landscapes, but committing more seriously to art felt less like adopting a new identity than recovering an instinct from childhood. Drawing and painting had once allowed her to become completely absorbed. Over time, expectations, competing paths, self-criticism and feelings of being an impostor made that instinct harder to follow. Her current practice has required learning to trust her own visual preferences again, including the restraint that characterizes her palette and compositions.
Atmospheric landscape now sits at the center of her work, though Gellner rarely sets out to describe an identifiable place. Observed scenery combines with remembered and imagined terrain until geographical certainty disappears. Her series Unlocated grew directly from this approach. Its landscapes appear plausible but cannot quite be placed. A recognizable element such as a tree, landform, stretch of water, figure or animal provides an initial point of contact. Beyond it, information becomes scarce. Gellner wants the viewer to have a way in, but not a map explaining where the journey ends.
Between Recognition and Disappearance
The tension between abstraction and recognition is central to Gellner’s visual language. Too much abstraction can remove the point through which she personally enters an image; too much description diminishes its mystery. Her paintings therefore operate within an unstable middle ground, where forms emerge before becoming uncertain again. Quiet matters, but she does not equate quiet with emptiness. A small person, animal, group of birds or barely perceptible trace of movement can suggest that life exists somewhere within an otherwise expansive scene.
Artists working across painting and photography have helped sharpen this sensibility. J. M. W. Turner is particularly significant for his ability to hold recognizable imagery and near abstraction together, especially through light and darkness. Gellner is drawn to the way Turner’s forms can dissolve without leaving the viewer entirely unmoored. In Man Ray’s photography, she responds to another kind of withholding: blur, shadow, simplicity and images that refuse to reveal everything at once. The monumental black-and-white landscapes of Sebastião Salgado and Ansel Adams offer a related lesson in scale, presenting nature as something immense beside the human figure.
Landscape itself remains the strongest influence. Gellner is attracted to the Alps, Scotland, Iceland, Finland, forests and remote northern environments, particularly when mist, clouds or changing light interfere with perception. Her childhood in Japan also remains present through an appreciation of simplicity, quiet, ritual and subtle transitions, alongside a sense that nature may contain things beyond immediate understanding. Music and poetry contribute another layer. She sometimes pairs a painting with a short sentence or thought, not to decode the image but to introduce another idea that can remain beside it.
Dawn Gellner: Letting the Unexpected Stay
One acrylic landscape became a turning point because it brought several of Gellner’s concerns into alignment. Some areas were clearly defined while others resisted identification; overlapping forms disappeared into one another, and spatial distance remained uncertain. Yet the painting retained enough structure for the mind to begin constructing a possible place. For Gellner, it demonstrated that mystery did not require abandoning recognizable landscape altogether. She could preserve depth and a sense of entry while allowing substantial parts of the image to remain unresolved.
An unexpected green also appeared during the process. The color had not been part of her original intention, but its strangeness gave the landscape a subtly otherworldly quality without turning it into fantasy. More importantly, the accident challenged her inclination toward control. The painting showed how an unplanned event could become more compelling than the intended result, strengthening her trust in intuition. Depth, distance, recognition and uncertainty converged in a way she had been searching for, even before she could clearly define what she wanted.
That willingness to relinquish control continues in her home studio. Gellner works from her own photographs as well as other photographic and printed references, combining a landform from one source with the distance, light or tonal structure of another. Once a composition and focal point begin to emerge, she removes, shifts and blurs elements or allows them to vanish. Alongside intense periods of painting, she is developing a steadier routine that includes sketches, notes, collecting material and preparing panels. Her next challenge is four 20 × 20 cm works for the Little Treasures exhibition in Italy later this year. Smaller than her usual paintings, the panels will test how much space and distance can survive within a compressed format while pushing Unlocated further toward the threshold where recognition almost disappears.
