The Nude in the 21st Century |
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Workshop and Purchase Award My work is both emotional and spiritual. My goal is for each of my paintings to be like a sonnet, contained with their own emotional identity. Within all my work my influences are spiritual. I create a landscape that holds an emotion that is timeless. This is based on my feeling that we create our environment based on our emotions, which become our vibrational signature. The figures in my paintings appear to be in a timeless void, much like the Buddhist concept of no beginning and no end. I'm searching for a special moment where the viewer moves beyond the identify of a certain individual, and instead begins to feel a vibration or a single feeling. I first experienced this paradigm shift from technically focused work to an emotional focus while studying art in Russia in 2003. I stood in front of paintings that I'd never seen before, and since I had no intellectual data for these paintings, I wasn't able to analyze them from the thinking part of my brain. Instead for the first time, I read the paintings by feeling them. This planted a small seed inside me which changed the whole way I now go about creating art. Today artists are trained to copy this and copy that, just like a photograph. My work is different, just like the Russian Avante Garde of the early 1900's, I support the concept of critical thinking. My process is slow, involving a distillation of thought in order to express myself in just the right manner to match my concept. Color is large part of the way I express myself. I control the palette, so all my work deals with strong color theory. I think about the emotion I'm trying to convey and what colors and value contrast I can use to best display that emotion. The emotional concept of not being able to control a situation is all part of my painting process, so I often let washes just run down the canvas. I work with the idea of motion or energy, usually starting with the least moving elements first, then moving to the ones with the most movement last. I describe light in my paintings by building layers to create depth and mood. When painting, I often explode with energy all over my studio. It's like being an orchestra conductor of energy and movement. After I completed my MFA at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2007, I settled in the country side north of San Francisco at the base of California's wine country. I currently work in a large barn that I lovingly share with my husband. I divide my time between painting, teaching and writing. I am currently writing an artist guide to Russian Art and I also maintain a monthly blog. I also lead a tour of the art in Russia the first week in July every year. | |
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