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Epiphanies
while walking the beach are shop worn at best and hackneyed
at worst, but that's where I was, and that's what happened.
Derailed
artistically in fourth grade by an overworked itinerant art
teacher who ridiculed my rendering of our family watching
television, I struggled to represent my art in a way I thought
was correct rather than being true to my own artistic impulse.
Although concentrating on courses in literature, writing and
theater, I always painted. Several decades ago while walking
the beach I realised there was no one to stop me from painting
anyway I wanted to, and using the relatively new vehicle of
acrylics I set upon recording our family of husband, wife,
six children, grandparents, dogs, cats and friends in our
day to day activities: time honoured, easily identified icons
Community
activities and the patriotic ideals they often depicted entered
my artistic lexion and inspired my art. When our children
were in college I started taking courses in drawing and watercolour,
completely confident in who I was in acrylic medium. In 1990
after a trip to Africa the landscape remembered with roads,
houses, people at work, play or in ritual, became integrated
into my art. As a result of my training at the Museum of Fine
Arts in Boston I encorporated tributes to well known artists
such as Matisse, Florine Stettheimer, Gabrial Munter, Chinese
painters and Japanese printers into my paintings, sometimes
in obvious homages of style, other times as jokes.
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In
1998 I embarked on what has thus far become ten trips to Italy
and the renaissance and the wonderous facets have crept into
my iconography particularly Giotto and his expressive figures.
My paintings
have thus evolved to be on the face of it straightforward
depictions of familiar landscapes and events, but incorporated
in them for the careful viewer are layers of meaning encapsulated
in the use of paint and images. I am as a person optismistic
and religiously observant, so the final glazing of meaning
is the life of grace in the compositional theme: the mystery
of iniquity, say, or unity of vision.
As a result
of my research and painting I have come to the strong and
unshakeable belief that folk artists have a mechanical genius,
a mother load of remembered iconograpy and the sleight of
eye ability to use ordinary objects to portray ordinary events
in an extraordinary way. It is a mystery, and therein lies
the core of my artistic belief.
Links
http://www.shelburnemuseum.org
http://www.folkartmuseum.org
http://www.ianfraser.biz
http://www.patlowerycollins.com/
http://www.owlkeeper.com
http://www.barbaradilorenzo.com
http://www.wavepaint.com
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