Immersing and Emerging

"Beside Myself"  Acrylic and mixed media on canvas

“Beside Myself” Acrylic and mixed media on canvas

 

True to form I’m coming up for air after months of taking the road less travelled (at least for me.)   This has been a time for introspection and experimentation as well as relaxation by default (by physician’s orders.)    I’m decades into this, my chosen profession, and past the mid century of my lifetime as this person, this artist.   So just as a personal life has chapters and evolves, so does my life as a painter.

My interest has always had a juxtapositional point of view from creating images that while  tipping more to the representational side, are at their core explorations of psychological states versus stepping into a more ambiguous and intuitively created visual space while holding onto natural themes.  This has been a continual push and pull for me.    I’m certainly not the first artist to this dance between divergent yet related themes.

As a painter I’m an introvert and what drives me is emotion, both in life and in my studio. This can be a strength and weakness simultaneously.   Just as our dream states create a landscape in which to work out issues, for me so does the workspace, the blank canvas.

For a good long while now I’ve been diverging from spending most of my time with my beloved pastels back to my brushes and wet media.    Its been an interesting journey and one I’ve been shy to share.     I have a new fondness for acrylics and mixed media, combined with casein, graphite and charcoal as well as my longstanding love for oils.    The challenge has been allowing myself to wander – the visual space of my abstractions in pastel is specific and immediate while the substrates and media in my “wet paint” studio encourages me to wander.    With exterior nature and the emotional landscape are at the core of these series, there is a degree of divergence in my path that I have surrendered to and embraced.

This summer I am featured in several galleries and the work in each show evolved around the theme of water.

At Robert Allen Fine Art in Sausalito, I have new pastels and acrylics featured in “Water Abstracted”Milwaukee, I have some earlier abstractions freatured  in “H2O in Art” David Barnett Gallery  and finally at Sewell Gallery in my town of Eureka I have work from my pastel series of abstractions on view.      Water is a fitting theme and common denominator not only in my recent work but as a metaphor for my recent past.

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Victoria Ryan