Hard Soft I Painting

Rebecca Stern is an artist living and working in Fairfield, CT. She graduated with honors from Lesley University College of Art and Design in 2009. Her work is numerous private collections and she has participated in solo and group exhibitions across the country for the past 12 years. About the work: The mind, absent of outside stimuli, is left to flow - to process without interruption, to examine and decipher truth. A lovely, if fleeting, ideal. My work serves to examine the complicated and distinct interruptions in the mental landscape that shape our emotions and actions. The universally understood themes of growth, change, grief, and joy are punctuated in complex moments of cloudiness, of tangled material cut to pieces and put back together. When the proper tools are absent, they are created. Giant, hand-hewn brushes are crafted, the archives of past work mined and put to use; layered, covered, and revealed again as bright beacons of color and dark caverns of stitches that give way to flowing, river-like brushstrokes. Each piece is a working-through of sorts, the discovery of a path that leads, however briefly, back to the pleasant background-hum of our minds at peace. A journey that creates areas to breathe, pause, release, and move along.