Artist Statement
The Atmospheric series are abstract, geometric paintings that represent the increasing temperatures over time in our region, and they also serve as emotional time markers in my life. The paintings are made slowly by masking off one wedge or band of color at a time on wood panels; each layer has multiple flat coats of acrylic paint and takes several days to dry. They can take months to create, so their titles reflect the time that passes while they are being made. The slow and steady process shifts the color based on the temperature in my studio that is open and connected to the outdoors in East Asheville. The color transitions also depend on my emotional state or experiences happening in my life. My paintings use subtle gradients and pastel colors to illustrate feminine elegance in the typically male dominated field of hard-edge abstraction, and there is an element of enlightenment or hope that I would like to share with this series.
The Highwayscapes are degraded landscape paintings of a vanishing open road. Part of these paintings include spray paint drips that appear like the sky is precipitating. All the details in the landscape have been reduced to bands of color. The very tight geometric landscape is broken by organic aerosol drips. These drips seemingly destroy the precision of the masked off shapes in the landscape. These paintings represent how we move through the landscape in automobiles, but also how this movement is causing warming and increasingly intense storms and infrastructure collapse. I believe that we as humans take from the landscape by existing within it, but we as artists can bring attention to this, so that we can find more environmentally friendly ways to coexist with nature in the future. Although temperatures might be shifting warmer globally, there is still a chance that we can reverse some of our effects.
