Pressure/In Diptych Painting

My Sculpted Paintings were a series I followed through from 2014-17. This is the largest piece I completed in this series, and the darkest one as well. While my other paintings are more airy and light, this one is more centered in the Earth's core. I had recently been on a trip out west and was very inspired by the browns and other neutral tones when exploring the desert. --------- As visually voracious creatures in a tech-driven culture, I had been thinking of how painting can pull itself out of the dimension of lighted pixels and revel in blissful materiality. Since we always relate to the things around us to our own physical bodies and the natural world, I combined painting and sculpting to create intimate paintings that tangibly speak about the organic vessels we reside in. Because of their shallow relief, they purposefully aren’t good candidates for photography and social media. To create these paintings, I mount each color of oil paint on top of each other, layering them where I sometimes end up forgetting what colors are underneath. I then scrape, peel, hack, rip, and lift the color from the confines of a flat surface to create three-dimensional, tactile geological protrusions. My procedural methods are partially controlled, but I also relinquish authority and let the paint move organically to harden into rigid, rock-like gestural marks. Part luscious, part abject, I’m interested in seeing how the painting traditions of representational figuration can be usurped, altered, and twisted into abstract peels that can reference the body and the landscape.