Certain Dark Things #9 Painting

Sarah Dineen was born in Brewster, Massachusetts. She has attended artist residencies at the Golden Foundation, Columbia University, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has exhibited at PULSE New York art fair, Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Sidney Mishkin Galley, NYC, The Last Brucennial, NYC, Edward Hopper House Art Center and Museum, Nyack, NY, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, NYC, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, MA, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA. Dineen received a BFA from Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City where she lives and works. Certain Dark Things is an ongoing series of paintings born form Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XVII. I have used this piece of writing as a still life of sorts, a place to begin and a place to pull imagery from its themes of secrecy, love, and darkness. As the series has evolved the forms have simplified, the velocity of mark making has slowed, and the idea of presence and monumentality have come to the forefront. The viewer is asked to find their own presence and their own body in relation to the presence of these large-scale forms. The forms themselves symbolize the body as a container for the self, a vast space of imagination, and pure potential. These forms also represent the self pushing out into the world on its own terms, making its own rules about how much to reveal and how much to conceal.