Cecilia Ramos: Within, Without
My work explores how color constructs space and how space informed emotional experience.
Grounded in New York City and Miami and shaped by international practice, I approach painting through an architectural lens, treating each canvas as a built environment defined by light, atmosphere, and chromatic tension rather than function.
My practice spans fantastical interiors and abstract landscapes; imagined spaces that feel familiar yet unplaceable, where color replaces realism as the primary organizing force.
Travel serves as a catalyst rather than a reference: saturated cities, mineral deserts, muted northern terrain, and shifting mountain light filter into my palette as atmospheric memory, alongside the accidental color collisions of urban life. Informed by my expertise in lighting design, gemology, and my inherent synesthesia, my paintings offer a lens through which I see the world. Ultimately, these alternate environments I create invite viewers to inhabit color as both a spatial and emotional experience.
Series One: Within, Without
Within, Without explores the threshold between architecture and landscape, real and imagined. Geometric forms float within, carve out, and meld with atmospheric terrains, creating spaces that feel both structured and fluid.
Bold color fields and layered horizons guide the eye through moments of transition and depth. Each piece invites pause; an interplay of what is held inside and what is released.
Series Two: The Far Elsewhere
The Far Elsewhere is a series of imagined landscapes shaped by travels, worlds built from memory, observation, and the quiet impressions places leave behind.
The color palettes are drawn from both the ordinary and the extraordinary: the subtlety of rock and moss in the tundra, or the brilliance of sun-soaked horizons. Each painting distills light, movement, and sensation into a realm that feels familiar yet other worldly.
These landscapes also serve as the atmospheric backdrops for Cecilia’s jewelry designs, the places where the pieces might breathe or be found.
About the Artist
Cecilia Ramos is a multidisciplinary artist and jeweler known for work that merges architectural clarity with painterly intuition.
Trained at MIT and Princeton across disciplines, she explores the interplay between constructed space, nature, and imagination, creating scenes that feel both grounded and fantastical. Her paintings transform the canvas into a place to inhabit; Atmospheric worlds where emotion, color, and structure converge. Cecilia Ramos is also Senior Director of Architectural Market at Lutron.
