Artist Registry
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STATEMENT OF WORK
This body of work is from my continued exploration of color and form inspired by everyday studio life. Small collages and then gouache paintings capture my initial inspiration. The collages are created using found and painted paper pieces, cut and arranged in ordered, playful, or chaotic ways. The collages are the starting point for the gouache paintings. Larger works evolve gradually, informed by the smaller works they take me further into explorations in color, light, and shape.
I recognize influences from the house I grew up in that was designed by my father and strongly influenced by Japanese design and the Bauhaus. His was a unique style that included white stucco exterior walls with broken symmetry in window shapes and rooflines. His open interiors held elegant geometries often punctuated by dark wood trim. Our house included unique window shapes that echoed the unusual roof lines. One pair have four edges, two square to the Earth, one vertical and one horizontal, but with the two other eges at different angles, somewhat resembling a junk or gaff rigged sail. Unexpectedly, many of my new paintings in Covid time evoked the shapes of these unusual windows of my childhood.
During this time of pandemic, many of us have become more aware of windows. I have found myself sometimes looking out into nature, or down on an industrial or architectural landscape, or seeing light edited by the window shape, creating shapes and patterns on a wall or a floor. Such shapes and colors seen in the architectural and natural landscape have informed these paintings.
I was pleased to read the derivation of the word window is from the Old Norse “vindauga”, which means “wind-eye”. A window as an eye, is an opening that suggests both interiors and exteriors. It is open-ended in meaning. This reflects how I would like people to view the work. The paintings explore regularity within regularity. At some, with shaped (non-square) edges, activate the space on the wall around them. My combinations of found forms and colors evoke the emotional and the aesthetic, and present the viewer with an opening to a personal and purely abstract experience, an unexpected window.
Elizabeth Gourlay, 2022