A Still Life

I love silence and solitude. I think that might be the reason I love painting a still life so much. I have always had a diaristic approach to my work. This awareness came to me while doing my masters over ten years ago.  I tried to find a visual language for grief during that period. Over 100 drawings emerged over time as I drew almost every day, like diary entries.  Now many years later as oil painting has become my almost daily practice, I seem to have grown attached to the still life, a very old genre often practiced by female artists over the years. It is a natural fit for me.   I do not strive to make exact representations of what I set up to paint, but allow spontaneous mark making to lead the way. Pears and apples are some of my favorite things to paint. After having made so many paintings of these sumptuous fruit subjects, one would think I can paint them with my eyes closed, but quite the contrary, every attempt seems to remain a challenge. The forever desire to broaden my mark making skills, the mixing of paint and discipline not to weaken the chroma by moving the paint around too much, are all skills that have room to grow. That place where abstraction and reality meet, is the sweet spot.  Light is everything to me,  muted color combinations and texture are always considered to offer experiences of form, time, memory and being.