I have written of beauty a great deal over the past few years as it fascinates me. The concept seems simple, yet I believe it is one of the most complex and powerful forces that we experience. Conceptually, we, as a human race, love to be pretty. We have come to believe, either through conditioning, experience, or ideology, that we must look a certain way to be accepted, to be valued, to be loved. No matter where one looks, the struggle to understand and contain beauty fuels just about everything we do. As these thoughts stewed in my soup of little grey cells over the past month I realized there would be no way to capture my entire struggle with beauty. So, I let it rest.
What happened next was one of those moments in an artist’s life that came straight from being plugged in and willing to listen…not to myself, but the canvas. Many times the page holds a message. The preliminary marks of a piece hold its truth if only the artist slows down long enough to hear it. As I let it rest, the message I was to learn became clear…that of transparency.
I make marks to create. Many of those marks are Asemic, meaning that they lack semantics, but are nonetheless a powerful form of how I communicate through my artwork. The collage pieces I started with were full of that type of marking, random, energetic, and a bit disconnected. As I began to add color, and line, and more marks, my heart felt the tug of needing to leave many of the marks visible. I struggled with that because I didn’t want to box myself in marrying the first layers of a painting. Still, I listened and the lesson of transparency kept resonating, so I actually boxed the layers in to contain certain ones….happy compromise.
comments +