When you look into a painting created by Yvonne Wright, a sense of wonder freezes your eyes upon the canvas. She draws you into a story she tells through her artwork with an attitude, a perspective of life featuring multiple images perceived through the irrationality of the unconscious mind.

Wright, a retired commercial and graphic artist, uses brushes and cameras to produce her visual themes that are on display at her gallery at Studio YNW located at 100 W. Broadway in Jim Thorpe. A self-proclaimed perfectionist whose creative talents coexist nicely with her university learned skills, Wright spends up to six months brushing layers and layers of oil paints on canvas until she captures the specific message that she intends to communicate through what she calls her “language of visualization.”

“My paintings are meant to be decoded,” she said. “There is a message in my work you discover through symbolic interpretation of people, animals, objects and elements of nature I draw, paint and photograph as my subjects.”

Wright titles all of her paintings. Last February, she created, “Innocence Lost,” an acrylic painting on canvas that “narrates the psychological implications of life in isolation.” Her images of a teenaged girl standing with a rat upon her shoulder are a prime example of what Wright calls the “bewilderment of it all - as globally experienced during the pandemic lockdown.” The rat signifies the immediate danger through the protection of social isolation that put everyone’s lives on hold. “Innocence Lost” is an example of Wright’s relevancy with her artwork where she portrays ordinary life within the realm of intellectual inquiry.

Bringing worldly acclaim to Jim Thorpe

When she’s not painting or drawing in her studio, Wright is out and about photographing the surrounding landscapes of the Pocono Mountains or writing stories about art and interesting people for the publication, “The Jim Thorpe Current,” a monthly newspaper that highlights community life in the area. Her photographs are snapshots in shades of black and white that feature her professional experience with digital technology.

Her many talents were fine-tuned at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Canada where she received a bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing and a master’s degree in art history. Her works have won numerous awards, especially with her small brush techniques she utilizes to paint miniature portraits.

Her public collections have been on display in Toronto, Poland and Germany and currently at the Dimmick Memorial Library in Jim Thorpe.

Wright lives with her husband, Michael, a retired aerospace engineer, who kiddingly brags about how she found her Mr. “Wright” 26 years ago in Toronto, Canada. Michael encouraged her to establish her own art gallery, and the perfect location for that and their current home is where her mother, an artist herself, had lived for many years. In addition to her personal creations at her gallery, Yvonne offers professional art restoration, cleaning and repairing vintage acrylic and oil paintings.

Through the mind’s eye

Wright invites prospective clients to inspect her creations very closely.

“I am concept and technique driven that draws on the legacy of surrealism to use a traditional representational style to convey a story.”

The casual observer might miss the full story that Wright reveals within her artwork. “In many of my works, the unexpected, the hidden and the playful can be perceptively revealed at closer inspection.”

One such painting is “Great Spirit Rising” in which Wright illustrates a bald eagle with a disturbing expression derived from its displeasure with human pollution and man’s failing stewardship of the Earth. Again, Wright displays multiple images here to convey the theme that the Great Spirit will reclaim its hold on the Earth. Upon close examination, one can see that the eagle wears a bee brooch signifying its homage to the disappearing bee population.

You get to intimately understand Wright’s conscious view of her experiences through her art. She thrusts her passion about the people she meets and the world she lives in upon her paint brushes and although she takes great pride in her photographic work, she makes it clear that there are distinct preferences between her tools of the trade that produce her pictures

“The digital camera and the technical ability to Photoshop can greatly alter the reality of a picture’s subject, but with my paintbrushes, I can create images that are unique expressions of my intellectual and emotional perceptions that become very personal representations and interpretations of the world we live in.”

Nonetheless, Wright incorporates a multimedia approach to her artwork that she loves to share with visitors who come to her studio.

“Art takes many forms,” she said. “It inspires, decorates, comforts and communicates, but most importantly, art indulges our senses and enriches our souls.”