Bedazzled, Bejeweled, and Charmed (I'm Sure) Painting

I live and work in
Chicago,Illinois. I am primarily a painter, but interested in object making and visual tableaus. I am a pink blimp floating in a white cube. A contaminator of theory but respectful of post modern's ability to open up visual strategy and open ended narrative possibilites copresent with abstraction. I believe in the erotic eye, the notion of all senses put on alert. That is what I want my paintings to acheive.

I am a mature artist but still in hot water.


BODY TROUBLE = THE FACTS OF LIFE
I have a deep and abiding interest in narrative painting, as it has always fueled my thoughts and studio practice. My relationship to narration is from a position of the uncanny and the ineffable. My paintings are meant to instruct, move, provoke and disturb. In other words the work should inject itself internally into the viewers psyche. Lately I have been using collage less and painting more, still remaining a lover of sumptuous surface, invested in a convoluted narrative and a painting language all my own.

I am perfectly comfortable with the description that my paintings project a capricious irritability and deception for I want them to be willfully fantastic and edgy. On the surface they provide a fictitious backdrop for eroticism; believing that painting still has an aura, and that it can be a repository for tenderness and occasionally originality and intoxication. For me, painting reflects the ambiguity of the every day, and therefore can be redemptive and subversive, gorgeous and disgusting - something to be celebrated and subject to suspicion as a marginalized site.

It is the mental, philosophical as well as the visual aspects surrounding painting that enlightens me. Double coded work, which uses abstracted decorative motifs fused with imagery that asks for a metaphorical rather then rational reading. Provoking and inviting speculation, my paintings are fairy-tale-like, projecting notions about complicity and good behavior. Painted concoctions that become phantasmagoric shifts about desire, art, culture, success, failure, faith and seduction; the work ruminates about the nature of body trouble and how it affects ones own existence.

"Phyllis Bramson's imaginative portrayals of stereotypical sexual relationships incorporate the passionate coplexity of eastern mythology, the sexual innuendos of soap operas and sometimes the happy endings of cartoons" -Miranda McClintic