Artist Statement March, 2011
Living in the Northwest evokes a mood that inspires me as a painter.. My compositions are found in urban landscapes as well as in the raw beauty of nature. I am always fascinated by pattern and color, which abounds in the natural world, as well as in the areas altered by man and his “work”. I seek to interpret the fantasy, distinct rhythm, pattern and ornate quality that is inherent in scenes that are familiar, but not always recognized as the underlying structure of the physical world. I work primarily in oil. I paint en Plein Aire as well as in the studio. As I paint, my awareness grows of the connection of all things. I would like my work to be visually splendid, to reflect a precious jewel-like quality in the use of color and paint, as well as offering an exciting relationship of shapes in the composition.
My art is personal in that I describe my feelings, experience and connections to specific areas of interest as I journey on the pathway of life. I find intellectual satisfaction in interpreting and sharing these experiences in my painting. “The artist needs no religion beyond his/her work”.
My painting narrative also takes in the docks and industrial areas of Ballard, a neighborhood in Seattle, where my grandfather was a shipbuilder and had a shipyard in the early 1900’s. Some of the landscapes I paint reflect this connection to place and my roots to the past, the path that is rooted in community and place. In my work I strive to take the familiar and create a new level of interest with an image that focuses attention on the ordinary and what we take for granted. This process involves abstraction that looks for the core of meaning and structure. New meaning, beyond the mundane generates a new interest for the familiar.
I am primarily an oil painter who also paints in watercolor as well as acrylics. During the winter months I paint in my studio on Hammersley Inlet, an arm of Puget Sound, where my painting evolves and becomes more abstract in the process of taking longer to complete. When one is no longer referring to nature the painting has a life and direction of its own. Living also in Seattle, I find the eclectic urban environment full of energy. I continue to focus interest on the scenes of man-made structures with tangled and visually interesting industrial sites.
At times I resolve the difficult issues confronting me in a painting with a mixed media approach. This is satisfying in that I am able to use the transparency of watercolor with the opaque nature of acrylics together. One of the solutions that I favor painting en plein aire is to paint in oil on paper. In this way, I am able to get a result that is immediate, gestured, with more intense color seizing the emotion of the moment. Drawing with paint and using washes on the paper gives a new dimension to the work. Each media has its strengths and limitations, whether for outdoor painting, or for work in the studio. I enjoy experimenting and searching for my individual expression. I have become a better painter in oils by virtue of what I have learned from watercolors. In the same way, learning to work with acrylics develops skills that are transferable to other media.
Painting is a way of sharing the experiences that have touched me and generate a creative response. I live, and become other than who I am in the images that I create.
signe heggem davis , March, 2011