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Artist's Statement
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“The attitude that nature is chaotic and the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.” Willem de Kooning
Viewing and painting a land “sweep” or landscape, I express myself through personal reflection. Memories of the past infuse my current vision and I willingly allow the two to combine—past and present mental visions, a blended perspective into my voice. This is how and why I paint landscapes that have elements of times past, but in abstraction. I love to see, as I hope the viewer does, a “surprise” or a moment that happens in my paintings, either while painting or after completion. It is important to me to keep some sense of traditional order in the landscape, but I also like to let the paint take on a life of its own and lead me to an end result that can be unexpected and seductive.
Plowed rows in fields are reminiscent of a past growing up in rural areas of the Midwest. Retracing routes to nearby towns and farms through endless fields of grain and dirt, being hypnotized by patterns of corn and soybean fields whirling by, and finding hidden objects in clouds and vistas--these are images etched in my brain that continuously return to me.
My work begins with a feeling of a landscape but progresses to a color exploration and a desecration or falling apart of the composition, letting go the prescribed visual references to a landscape and allowing me (and the viewer) to wander and explore. I use a palette knife to apply the oils to give a tactile quality and enhance the painterly and gesture activity.
Notes:
“Variation on a Theme”:
This particular body of work is from a collection of paintings created in collaboration with rhapsodies. Inspired by George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, Franz Liszt’s, “Hungarian Rhapsodies”, and other compositions, each of the nine paintings have the same basic composition. Listening to these particular rhapsodies announced particular colors or hues. I incorporated these found colors and hues into the paintings, aligning them with the flow of the musical composition. A rhapsody is a composition irregular in form, similar to an improvisation, without dependence or natural connection. This “rambling” depiction seems to best fit this series of paintings.
“X-scapes”
The “X “marks the spot on a map or the point of final rest and reference in a quest. Not being personally affected by the floods of 2008 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I wanted to empathize with my friends who were unwillingly succumbed to the river’s violent surge and the horrendous aftermath. This reality allowed me to approach the paintings as an escape from the environmental vengeance on Iowa - envisioning a dream of a better tomorrow. My interpretation of mountain ranges in continuous seasonal battle and the awkward tension of impending storms and raging rivers, inspired me to paint this group. Escaping the stagnancy of orderly life and safety of conformity is what I desired while developing this series. To relinquish the traditional landscape and proceed with the ‘ideas of color’ in conjunction with compositions of the abstracted landscape is the definitive lure of the X-scapes.
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online art gallery by julia kottal
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