Experiments With Beauty
As a maximalist, my method with The Experiment with Beauty series is to combine randomly applied linear marks in pastels with painterly marks in acrylic on a colored underpainting. Qualifiers such as age, gender, skin color, clothing, and body adornment collide with passages of thick, dripping, painted shapes that are both playful and mesmerizing in relationship to the figure. Each painting had to be completed in one session- usually in the span of an afternoon. This prevented me from overworking and overthinking the experimental nature of the project.
Experimenting with beauty has enabled me to create more expansive narrative images in which my own search for meaning through the beautiful collides with the reality of our current global human and ecological existential crisis. Beauty may be the bridge for this project, but I fully expect that something more nuanced, complicated, unsettling, yet potentially restorative will be found on the other side.