Artist Statement
(The Learning to Speak series.)
Something that speaks?
The body of work I am currently focused on is a manipulative and playful integration of the materials around me. It is an exercise in my cognitive development as a painter. As an artist, a mother, a student, a woman, a person on this Earth for that matter, I have a multifaceted and chaotic lifestyle that is reflected in the piecing together of my work.
Organized chaos. Maybe that describes it, too.
Whatever you want to call it, my art is imitating my life. In these paintings I have found a way to discuss this beautiful mess. For one fleeting moment I can be everything that I am; all of my selves can exist in a state of delicate and harmonious simultaneity.
Bleach, paper, acrylic, and lipstick are the media of choice in my paintings. The initial smaller pieces I created were fast and impulsive. Working with bleach and lipstick was an alluring formula due to the contradictory lush and corrosive qualities of the materials. They represented, in my eyes, the duplicitous nature of being a woman. The heart of my smaller studies was the media, but in my larger pieces I realized that the process itself had become the emphasis. In tearing, collaging, reworking, drawing, and painting, I found a way to work that embraces the way my mind operates. I am an arranger. An organizer. A mess-maker with a Bachelor’s degree. These are child’s play for me. They are fun.
They express most clearly (without being so illustrative) the way I feel about my life.
How do I maintain a household, a child, and still be (and make) something beautiful?
Something that speaks?