Description
Over the past couple of years, I have increasingly been drawn to the use of powdered pigments dissolved in water or acrylic medium. I like to draw these mixtures out onto the canvas in large sheets of color, sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque and sometimes leaving behind granules or clumps of pigment as a sort of bodily evidence of their being. These painterly marks are visual reminders for me of a childhood spent swimming, waterskiing and laying out in the sun on Clark Hill Lake in Georgia. Diving into the opaquely greenish brown water I would feel the coolness on my sun toasted skin; swimming underwater I would feel the cool spots and notice the warmer layers near the surface as I came up for air.
The soil in Georgia is red clay, a sticky, staining substance tinting everything that comes into contact with it an earthy orange. As a girl, I was enmeshed in a society that insisted on clinging to beliefs about the glory of the Confederacy. It was only after living away from the South that I understood a fuller spectrum of the history of the region of my birth, and the history that is still evolving there. My bare feet and clothes no longer carry evidence of contact with that soil, but its marks still exist on my soul.
In my painting, I think of the artist Roni Horn’s work, which deals with duality. Each of the pigment paintings I make deal with absorption, dissolving and sediment; qualities that have to do with deeply felt emotions of love and comfort that nevertheless must live alongside bitterness, disappointment and rejection. As in Horn’s work, I paint in order to struggle with the need to accept that two things can be true at the same time.
I will never forget the smell of the lake as it gently lapped the red clay shoreline on early summer mornings. The elemental notes of iron, mineral notes of rock, ephemeral notes of water, animalistic notes of fish mixed with the stubbornly intrusive gasoline note from the bobbing boat, a reminder of the human interruption imposed on the place.
