Landscape Gesture
charcoal on paper
18" x 23"
2007
18" x 23"
2007
April 27 through May 16, 2008
Melissa Brown:Emerging Edges: Paintings, Drawings, Prints
Artist's StatementMelissa Brown:Emerging Edges: Paintings, Drawings, Prints
An underlying order exists in the world around us, and there is a purpose even in apparent chaos. As an artist, I seek to make sense out of the hectic multitude of visual cues we receive every day. While I initially draw spatial relationships from observed reality, I allow for new possibilities of order to arise beyond what a pure representation can offer me. My work plays with abstract spaces that appear frenetic, but which are organized by an emerging structure. It is the process of finding and controlling this structure that drives my work. In the effort to resolve an image, I see paralleled the ways in which we wrestle with the chaos of life, looking for a reason.
Recently I have been referencing densely clustered spaces found in nature, such as twisted vines or overlapping branches. The crowding of lines that I see in these subjects sets up an arena of confusion sufficient to engage my pursuit of order.
Edges define space, carving object into air. An edge immediately sets up a tension of positive and negative space. As “negative spaces,” air, light, and atmosphere can be both fleeting and consuming forces. When light streams through the tangled branches of a tree, for example, the structure is defined and clarified by the light while at the same time dematerialized by it. The space (light, air) both fills and surrounds, pushing against what would try to contain it. I’m engaging in this push, this expansiveness. While a particular characteristic of light, a certain tension of edges, a shift of planes may inspire a starting gesture, the rest of the process is not so easily contained. The development of a piece reacts with and against itself as I layer, scrape back, reevaluate, cover and expand. At times in this process I will “lose” the image and have to redefine the structure of focal areas, movement, etc. Sometimes a new, unexpected order arises; that’s where it gets exciting.
My work reflects the ways that we look for meaning in times of loss, uncertainty and instability. For me, art making is part of the search, the longing for something more than what we can immediately understand. Hope defines and expands the journey, and as an artist I look for a transformation from randomness to reason.