New Beginnings

Studio wall 2017

I began this blog in 2009 with "some of this and that about art " and also featured artists working their studios. I have always been interested in artists' inspirations, story, personal history,point of view and studio life.

What inspires you? What makes the hair on your neck go up? What do you take pictures of? What is your personal history? What artist's work turns you on and why? What do you see outside your window in the studio? What's on your bookshelf? What do you listen to? Thoughts in the studio?

Those are the kind of questions I will be asking myself and others again.
Stayed tuned but meanwhile here are some interesting posts from the past:

Mine from 2009
Steven Alexander,Paul Benke,Hannalore Baron,Rebecca Crowell,Diane Englander,Lorrie Fredette,Brenda Goodman,Matt Langley ,Lucy Mink,Diane McGregor,Tim McFarlane,Nancy Natale
Leslie Neuman,Sue Post,Fran Shalom,Titles,Inside/Outside,Etiquette of the Studio Visit

"Talking" 48 x 38 pigment sticks on panel 2016    R&F Handmade Paint Collection

Barbara Fisher

I went to visit Barbara Fisher's studio when I was in Asheville this July and found a huge shift going on in her work. Known for her colorful iconographic gridded imagery, the work has moved to a dark, mysterious, atmospheric space with merging marks and forms. It feels like a thinking space on a chalkboard. Have a look:

All are oil, oil stick, charcoal, pastel on birch panel

Tangled Thoughts - 30 x 30

Hubris - 16 x 16

Evidence - 40 x 40

Unwinding - 16 x 16

Barbara lists her Influences: early ones include Van Gogh, Gauguin, Klee.The German Expressionists,  Guston.  New Image painters of the early '80's (Jennifer Bartlett, Susan Rothenberg).
Non artist influences - Carl Jung and other psycho-philosophers. Contemporary physicists - Mario Livio, Brian Green.

She is currently in  Southern Abstraction: A New Look at the Mobile Musuem of Art. In 2013 a solo show is planned for the Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory NC.

For years my artistic language consisted of iconic shapes and symbols, reduced to their simplest forms. I gradually began to break them up into what felt like pieces of images.  Recently they have disintegrated further into fragments of thoughts, gestural marks, and scribbles – hovering in undefined, unrestrained atmospheric spaces.   Switching from canvas to birch panel resulted in a dramatic shift in the work’s physicality. Spontaneous marks provide a history of transformation and change.   The paintings are worked over a long period of time, giving the appearance of old walls that have been written and drawn on for years.

 The history of process and transformation evident in the finished paintings continually reminds the viewer of the inevitability of change and the impermanence inherent in all things.   The wood surfaces are sanded, scribbled on, painted over, wiped off and otherwise distressed.  The essence of my creative inquiry is to dissect and examine again and again my perceptions of truth, reality, and the Self that derive from external sources, turning that experience into a visual record.

Clues

As I struggle to clarify, simplify and rewrite my artist's statement I am struck by the clues I find in my photos:





Looking from the inside out of Cora Jane Glasser's studio


Looking from the inside out of Cora Jane Glasser's studio