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Three years ago, Philadelphia artist Maryann Matlock-Hinkle came down from hiking a mountain in Tibet profoundly changed. Her paintings, already sharply colored and interpretive, became even more so in ways that are still emerging.

Matlock-Hinkle’s confrontation with a blizzard in the rarified air of a remote, rugged landscape continues to play out in her oil paintings, which comprise her solo exhibit “Color Encounters” at the Villanova University Art Gallery from Jan. 12 – Feb. 13. A free public reception to meet the artist will take place Friday, Jan. 16, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the gallery on the Villanova campus. The exhibit is supported in part by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

“On a glacier at 19,000 feet, I looked into a pool of water beside my foot and saw the image of my own fundamental existence. Impermanence took on a whole new meaning for me,” says Matlock-Hinkle of her pilgrimage to Mt. Kailish, a holy mountain for Buddhists, Hindus and others. Her work, writes one reviewer, “is genuinely meditative.”

“After living in one of those landscapes for four weeks, I now understand what the Sung Dynasty landscape paintings were all about,” says Matlock-Hinkle, herself a student of Tibetan Buddhism. All of the works Matlock-Hinkle presents in her Villanova show have been done since her Mt. Kailish experience. She adds: “What stays with me to this day is the intensity of the experience, of being swallowed up in that remote landscape, and the clarity of high altitude color. What I’m after in my painting is the realization of a presence true to my experience. Transcribing the feeling of overwhelming vastness into the ‘art space’ of a canvas is the challenge.”

For Matlock-Hinkle, shape, form and space are all secondary. “Color is the most important thing,” she says, adding, “Shape is the artist’s vocabulary. Once you develop your own shape, you keep it. Color, however, involves changeability, movement and energy, just as shifting colors and shapes magically transform landscape. Color is always changing -- warm to cool, light to dark and bright to dull – all hues and all combinations. It’s a slippery medium.”

Matlock-Hinkle never plans the outcome of a painting. Typically, her approach to a canvas is oblique. She’ll tinker around it, doodle, or start to clean up the studio, with the blank surface never far from sight or thought. When she’s as open as she can be to its possibilities, she moves in. “Then, all of a sudden, there’s a canvas full of color facing me. Bringing color clarity in my painting is the true experience.”

She wants viewers approach her work as openly as possible. “A person open to a painting will have an emotion about it. You don’t have to ‘get’ one of my paintings, because there’s nothing to get. What’s important to me is that a feeling is evoked, whatever it may be.” She’s so intent on having viewers attach their own inner response to her paintings that she assigns them numbers rather than defining titles.

A past recipient of the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award, Matlock-Hinkle has also won a William Emlen Cresson Memorial Traveling Scholarship, as well as painting scholarships from the Pew Charitable Trust and Barnes Foundation.

The Muller Gallery in Jenkintown, Pa., hosted her most recent solo exhibit, “Mt. Meru, Still and Moving,” in 2002. Other recent one-person exhibits include “Centrovision” at the Rosenfeld Gallery in Philadelphia and “Spirit Enclosures” at the Philadelphia Meditation Center. She has also had solo shows in New York and England.

Among group exhibits, her work was featured in the 35th annual Juried Exhibition of Art of the State of Pennsylvania in 2002, the Borowsky Gallery’s “Small Worlds – Bigger than Life” show, “World Artists for Tibet” at the Muller Gallery, and “Post-Pennism I” at the University of Pennsylvania.

Matlock-Hinkle is currently an adjunct professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA). She also teaches art at the Wayne (Pa.) Art Center. She earned a master’s in Fine Art – Painting from the University of Pennsylvania, a certificate in painting from PAFA, and a masters degree in education at Michigan State.

More information about the exhibit may be obtained by telephoning the Villanova University Art Gallery at 94612. Exhibited works may also be previewed on the Internet at www.artgallery.villanova.edu.