seismic tesseract, string cheese Painting

Each painting has a story that begins with an everyday experience, a current event, an experience shared with my daughter, or simply a looking and seeing moment. While I work, memories surface. The work walks itself back into the past: memories, some peaceful, some dark. Without censorship, I allow them to flow into my mark, into my responses of lines and color. At first I work slowly, mimicking life; carefully, beginning the foundation of a journey with an end I cannot yet perceive. I respond to that impulse – sometimes with a large brush, a sweeping mark and at other times, very tiny determined lines. I refer often to architecture and biology in a way to curb my too free impulses, to provide structure and to create a recognizable or enterable world. I engage the work spontaneously, often with aggressive cuts and extraction. Then, like someone ashamed at an outburst, I bury things by pouring material over them; I sand the work. In the process, hidden things resurface, revealing a visual mixture of the veiled past and the surface which I see as the present. This creates an archeology beyond my anticipation. This archeology is the link I seek to have a conversation with my viewer. The layers of my personal journey, the process of figuring things out for myself through failure and rediscovery, and the letting go of it all, these are the entry points for story telling, these are where a viewer will find a connection and link. And when that happens amazingly, you, the viewer, take it past where you found it. Teresa Getty received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 2007. She now resides and continues to make her art in Seattle, WA, USA.