When we were fearless

Martina Nehrling is an American abstract artist whose dynamic and richly textured paintings evoke kaleidoscopic worlds of pattern, color, shadow and form.

In this painting, Nehrling explores youthful disregard for danger, recalling a season when with friends she would leap across a light well from a third storey window to the rooftop of the neighboring building.
The streetlight flickered up through trees in sync with a lake-scented breeze, and the contour of downtown Chicago was a crystalline mirage in the dusk. Though she shudders with gratitude, she remembers feeling part of the sky and all its colors.