Artist Statement, Searching High and Low at the Woman’s
Club of Minneapolis Gallery,
November 5, 2019 - January 5, 2020
In 2017 I turned to still-life. I assembled everyday objects across several table-tops — abandoned mechanical parts, toy medieval knights, empty necktie boxes, bottles, dried gourds, candlesticks, and curtains saved from a grandmother’s home. Into these tableaux I introduced a dozen plaster reproductions of iconic Classical, Renaissance and later sculptures, including two each of the Laocoon and His Sons and of Michelangelo’s Dawn from the Medici Chapel, and a large bust of Napoleon. The new works conjure up order and chaos, the sublime and the ruined, the high and the low.
The works chosen for this exhibition fall into three categories: “blind” contour drawings (an introductory exercise familiar to art students, in purest form requiring one to look only at the subject, not the paper, while never lifting pencil from page); gestural studies using charcoal, pastel and/or graphite; and acrylic paintings on both canvas and paper. In the last I began to learn a great deal new to me about the spatial and metaphoric power of color.