A Culture of One's Own (SKF)

 I was asked by another artist, have you ever been struck to the core by a painting? Yes, many paintings have had that affect. But through the years my appreciation will wane and I'll forget all about them. One painting still lingers in the background since my twenties. During an unfettered time in my life I had a list of works that I would visit like old friends. Every chance I could  I would go and simply sit in their prescence. "The Train Arriving at the Gare Saint- Lazare" at the Fogg Art Museum is one of those paintings. I found that the same visual excitement came up when I began this new series of aqua media drawings( watercolor, gouache, and watercolor crayons).Somehow my mind had returned to this famous oil painting when I was rethinking my working methods.

I started a new approach to my work by attempting to head towards a more improvisational method. As I'm writing, I'm am also presently listening to Bill Evan's "On Green Dolphin Street".  This brings me to a personal analogy in order to further explain. I learned to play the bass violin in junior high and high school. I could read music but if I was asked to play with another on the spur of the moment I couldn't. Only rigid and formal expressions were what I could do and I didn't feel there was much room for me in that equation.

In these new works, I am cultivating a less restricted vision so more of me can come through the work.I want to jam with my own perceptions. I try to abstract tiny moments to encompass the unnoticed bits to include an implied panoramic landscape feeling condensed into a still tableau. For a flickering of a moment, the viewer enters a gateway where time stops and  every piece of the world glows with spirit from the inside out. This is what I "see", now, can I approximate an expression of this reality?
Seriously, I don't know but I think Jasper Johns said it when he stated that artists create their own problems which they set about solving.
At the end of the day, I shut my studio door and it's just me and the work. No short cuts.
Love,
Sarah