In her latest showing, Dreams from My World, Trina Sears Sternstein offers a masterclass in restraint, devotion, and reverence for the landscape of Western Massachusetts. Through roughly fifteen works — a mix of oil-on-linen masterworks and smaller oil-on-paper studies — the Hawley-based painter guides viewers through an intimate, atmospheric exploration of sky, forest, and the shifting veil between day and night.
“Dreams from My World”
Paintings by Trina Sears Sternstein
On view through June
Salmon Falls Gallery
1 Ashfield Street, Shelburne Falls, Mass.
Open daily, 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
(413) 625-9833 • salmonfallsgallery.com
From the arresting golden cloudburst in Blues and Yellows to the cloaked hush of Cloudy Moon, Sternstein demonstrates an exacting control of tone and texture. Her distinctive pointillist-adjacent brushwork invites close inspection, but never veers into fussiness. Each composition feels carefully distilled, the noise of modern life stripped away to leave only the fundamental interactions of light, air, and land.
What’s striking is how consistently she commits to the in-between: Cloud Fantasy hovers in a sky just before the storm; Surprise reveals a low mist cradled in the foothills of the Berkshires; Shadows dramatizes filtered light with such precision it feels almost cinematic. These are not snapshots. They’re slow visions. Meditations.
Her forest pieces — particularly Magic Woods and the delicate Study for Spooky Woods — are immersive, almost hypnotic. Trees aren’t just vertical elements; they are characters, some leaning in on whispers, others stretching away from the viewer as if resisting the frame itself.
That sense of emotional undercurrent is most fully realized in Dance for Leila, a towering web of leafless branches backlit by wintry light. It’s the most explicitly elegiac work in the show, and — at $9,600 — the most expensive, perhaps due to both size and subject. It feels like a personal offering, one that lets memory blur into myth.
The celestial pieces — Magic Moon, Cloudy Moon, and Study for Dreaming of Stars — expand her tonal palette. The moon is rendered not as a glowing cliché, but as a presence: soft, weighty, often barely punching through veil-thick skies. It’s the kind of observational honesty that can only come from someone who, as her artist’s statement affirms, “has never taken for granted” the night sky unspoiled by human intrusion.
And that brings us to the heart of the work — not realism, but reminder. Sternstein’s compositions are fictional in detail but deeply truthful in spirit. They may or may not be portraits of specific places, but serve as potent homages to a region, to a way of seeing that is under threat. Her hope, she writes, is that her pictures might “make some small contribution to saving what is left of the loveliness of our area.”
They do.
Verdict:
Trina Sears Sternstein’s exhibit is a powerful and quietly political act of preservation — not through confrontation, but through invitation. It urges the viewer to stop, to breathe, and to remember what’s still here… for now.
About Salmon Falls Gallery
(from the gallery’s website)
For over 35 years Salmon Falls Gallery has showcased the beauty and craftsmanship of over 90 independent artists from around western Massachusetts and the surrounding area. These artists have created a range of items from practical everyday objects to spectacular showpieces, including wool handbags by Katherine MacColl, pastels by Rebecca Clark, and otherworldly porcelain sculpture by Lulu Fichter. Salmon Falls Gallery is owned by world renowned glass artist and Shelburne resident Josh Simpson.
