I have always used art as a tool to process what is going on around and within me. I believe what I now call the landscape of
the mind has always been the focus of my work despite my having painted many different
subjects. I consider making art a journey, and mine
seems to be cyclical. It takes time for themes to emerge as I continue to discover, the seeds for what I am doing now were in my previous work. I often have ideas about what my work
means as I am creating it, but it is time and distance that bring true
understanding. I continue to re-work old themes but in new ways. Cloud forms
and silhouettes, for instance, have made appearances in my work repeatedly, but always in a different contexts.
Being able to paint what’s on my mind allows me to make sense of the world, to
take things apart, re-arrange them, and reimagine them differently.
As a child, I drew and painted
things I was interested in over and over again. In high school, I began my journey with watercolor by painting signs I drew for pep rallies with a cheap set of Prang paints
on copier paper. I can’t think of more frustrating tools with which to work in
watercolor, but something clicked for me . . . the transparency, the flow, that lent itself to tiny details, and the jewel-like color. In college, I began
painting self-portraits from blind contour drawings. They were odd and surreal. I
distinctly remember painting them in a stream of conscious manner, which is
something I’ve returned to recently. Although I feel I’ve always had the soul of an
artist, I certainly didn’t always have the skills. I spent many
years learning to draw and paint,
and I am still continuing to do so. This is something I stress frequently in
the classes I teach. That art is like anything else, if you want to become good
at it, it requires a lot of practice. It isn’t a magical inborn gift, although
some of us are born with more facility to begin with.
For many years, I drew rather
than painted with watercolor paints. I used them to create miniatures of a sort, surreal landscapes inside
silhouettes of women. I started this series in the last year of my MFA program
with a painting called Winter Within.
My best friend and painting partner had recently committed suicide. She was
someone with whom I felt I would have had a
lifelong friendship, as we had an understanding of one
another that I consider extremely rare. The silhouettes were a way to turn my dark
and depressing experiences into something beautiful, and to deal with crippling
loss. I find art that rides the line between ugliness and beauty is the most
powerful and satisfying to me, as it
jolts and soothes the system simultaneously. I painted my friend over and over
again, I filled her silhouette with butterflies sucking the life-blood out of
flowers, poppies alluding to the glass being half empty, birds in flight and
even painted her with a crow on her shoulder in My Dark Side.
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| My Dark Side, Watercolor on Arches HP, 15” x 11.25” |
I think of watercolor like
walking a dog in which the length of the lead can be
controlled by the push of a button. In the silhouette series, I had the leash
in close and the button locked. The watercolor was forced to do my bidding and
stay exactly where I put it. In my current work, I’ve let go of the button. Although
I still maintain hold of the leash, the watercolor is allowed more freedom to
do what it chooses. This interplay between tightness and looseness has taken me years to achieve, as I think it was both a psychological
and technical issue. I had to grant myself permission to loosen up. I used to think that if I didn’t paint realistically,
I wasn’t proving my worth as an artist, despite the fact that I had long
admired the work of many artists who weren’t realists.
At some point the constraints of
working tightly and representationally became so painful that I realized I could no longer continue to make work in that way. I had solved most of the problems with the
silhouettes, and I was tired of transcribing
visions I saw in my head. Of course, what came out on paper never looked like
it did in my mind, and on rare occasions it was better! I found it difficult to leave the Silhouette series behind and move into the unknown. I no longer had fully
formed paintings appear in my mind’s eye. What was I to paint? What would it
look like? For some time, I created very little, and I worried I would never paint
again. I felt stuck and wasn’t sure how to proceed. I needed to learn to
experiment again.
In 2011, I had an artist residency
in the Luce Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary,
for which I will be forever grateful. It gave me the time and space to make
work simply for the sake of creating. The
stipend allowed me to give myself a pass on making paintings that had to be sold, and it opened the door for
experimentation. I had a palette cleanser of sorts. I worked in conte crayon
and charcoal on grey paper without much color, which led to the watercolor
paintings in the Actus et Potentia series.
Looking at them now, I can see a battle happening between the tight and loose manner of working. The twister form became more and more prominent in my work, and would eventually lead to Twists and Falls, a series that explores relationships with others and my battle with chronic pain.
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| There be Dragons Here, Watercolor on 4ply gray museum board, 40” x 32” |
In 2013, I was invited to teach
and use the studio at Welsey where I once again embarked upon experimental
work, this time on yupo, which is a synthetic paper made of polypropylene
plastic. The Wayfarer and Map for the Eyes series are both
painted exclusively on this surface. Yupo’s non-absorbent surface allows for nearly endless paint removal. It facilitates additive and subtractive painting in a
way that the smooth and delicate hot press paper I’d used for many years cannot.
I let the paint pool on the paper, dropped-in color, and worked in a manner I
refer to as controlled chaos. The fact that I could make corrections or wipe
everything back to nothing emboldened me in my application of paint. If I
didn’t like it, I could start again! In contrast, some
of the silhouettes took me upwards of 90 hours each and there was no place for experimental painting in those works.
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| In my Head, Watercolor on yupo,18” x 26” |
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| Sin Options, Watercolor on yupo, 26” x 40” |
Despite the fact that I paint
quite differently now, I still remain attracted to lots of negative space
around a subject. The white of the paper serves as a resting space for the
viewer’s eye.
I have (surprisingly to myself) returned to the silhouette recently in Bodies of Water, but they are looser,
amorphous beings pulled from my subconscious. Now I start by laying down a few
strokes of paint on the paper. I let the focus of my eyes go fuzzy and I begin
to see a loose silhouette, sometimes they change position before my very eyes. Being back on hot press paper is a less forgiving surface, but I still employ the additive and subtractive methods I used on yupo to try and carve the figure from the pool of water. It was recently pointed out to me that I am making monotypes, but not printing them. This method of working depends a lot on chance, the weather
and temperature can affect the way the paint moves and dries.
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| Storm is Coming, Watercolor on yupo, 8” x 5" |
I’m excited to see where this
series goes. I recently bought a large roll of
watercolor paper and plan to make paintings that are scroll-like and roughly five feet tall. I
can loosely envision what it might look like, enough of a
daydream to spur on my exploration, yet undefined enough to leave room for chance and
exploration. I will attempt to paint these works vertically on a wall
rather than flat on a table, something I have never done before in my 23 years
of watercolor. This will cause all sorts of new problems to solve and embrace.
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| Drifting, Watercolor on Fluid HP, 12” x 9” |
This is Week 2 of Artists Tell Their Stories in 2018. Thank you for reading and sharing Alexandra’s story today. To connect with Alexandra
and see more of her work, please visit the following links:
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