Boat, 2013

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on October 15, 2013 at 5:19pm

I'm so happy that my comments resonated with what you're working towards. The new direction with personal iconography is rich with possibility.  I don't think you'll be in any danger of losing your viewer with less recognizable forms.  If anything, they evoke multiple associations and vulnerability and will solicit deeper looking and understanding. Thanks for sharing your beautiful work, and ideas.

Comment by MaryOlsson on October 14, 2013 at 3:03pm

Thanks for taking the time to look at my images. I joined this forum for feedback and it's great to read your comments! I felt that the cherubs were fun in the beginning, (they were in a lot of other images I did recently), but after a time I thought they presented too many problems: the imagery is common and generalized, teetering on the edge of greeting card cuteness. That can be a good thing, but in this case I think he problems outweighed the advantages. So loaded with common references, my own references were easily overlooked or lost completely. I think the cherubs are going to take a break for a while.

the boat and my other more fluid pieces are a new development just in the last couple of months prior to a show. I worked around the clock and broke away from the card format completely. Instead I started to explore the symbols of my own childhood, and that gave me a powerful connection to my work that the card symbolism didn't have.

thanks again for your comments, and for the folks putting this site together: it's great, a fantastic job.

Comment by Resident Curator on October 14, 2013 at 10:39am

Curator’s Comment:

 

I love the relationship between gestural figuration and pattern in these mixed media screen prints.  The intricate field of organic ornamentation supports the floating associations with the figure and ground.  Boat, in particular, creates a stunning hierarchy in the repeated echoing of the pictures motif.  The childlike references, including the exaggerated water droplets, by no means descend into sentimentality but suggest a pictorial rhythm between past and present.  While the horizon cuts the composition mid-center, the result is more subtly stabilizing than static or fixed. In fact, the dissolving of its edge implies an inner state of flux. I do read the large black ‘boat’ in the center as a seagoing vessel of sorts, but a curiously clumsy one, as if made from crudely folded paper.  The dark tonality adds to its physical encumbrance; a heavy stone in a pale liquid pond.  Ace of Diamonds interestingly pushes the symmetry of the pattern further into systematized order.  But I’m not sure about the cherubs at the very bottom.  They appear to be unusually specific in your vocabulary of forms.  It may be the thematic commitment to the card design that pulls me out of the dreamy spaces fluidly created in your more abstract images.