Some
Thoughts on My Work
For
fifteen years I had been making photo-based works of images
of subjects
from nature like leaves, seedpods and trees. My process was
to attempt
to eliminate the unnecessary and leave only the simplest of
forms to represent
nature in her complexity. The individual images that made
up the various nature
portfolios were quite stark and direct with the subject
centered in the middle of
the page specimen like, all non essentials having been
removed and stripped away.
In the final enlarged images the small forms took on a
almost monumental presence.
Three years ago I began painting for the first time, and
after working in black and white for so many years, my
paintings were confined to a narrow colour range. There was
some initial experimentation with colour but I found myself
pulled back to working with more restricted colour,
imparting a more sombre impression to the images. I always
like to have some parameters set out for my work, a
structure, especially at the beginning of something new.
The paintings I first began were done in colours of earth,
whites and greys. Like with my previous photo-based work
the essence in the new paintings seemed naturally
suggestive of natural elements around us.
The Earth paintings present a perspective that is at once a
landscape and a cross section into the interior. The
surface disproportionately gets most of our attention,
while the interior below the surface membrane, hidden and
unseen is of less interest. Having visual access
simultaneously to the surface and interior is not the norm;
and can therefore cause feelings of disorientation. By
simultaneously showing the surface and the normally hidden
underside, above and below receive equal ranking. The
paintings do not give greater importance to the one over
the other they are thus bestowed, with equal significance.
Furthermore, the horizon line can no longer be counted upon
to represent a truthful division, since the paintings
present it as a more theoretical and fluid line of
separation through the Earth’s crust.
The Moon is rendered intensely monochrome in cool chalky
grays presenting the surface in the way our sensory
experience of this distant object would suggest. They
reproduce in a comparatively realistic manner the object we
can actually see, but depict only parts instead of the
whole, as if to suggest the actual size to be such as to be
uncontainable on the canvas’ surface.
With the white abstract paintings, I begin with painting
the surface of the canvas white, not a bright white but
something closer to the colour of pale flesh. I then pull
things out, through the layering of the paint. It’s totally
intuitive with no reference to anything outside of itself
and my desire is to make an image that, while it is spare,
it feels whole and complete in and of its self-containing a
visual’ life’. In a visually noisy world I’m happy to have
my work to resonate with a certain ‘quietness’.
The process of painting itself is very mysterious. I feel
like I am doing battle with the paint, and this is not what
I had expected. I expected to experience it as an almost
transcendent activity, when going well. But instead of
flowing smoothly and effortlessly, it is mostly awkward,
clumsy and full of what feels like missteps all along the
way. But a point is eventually reached when in spite of
that, it begins to look and feel like something. The layers
of time, fused with layers of paints becomes in the end, a
painting.
Adriene Veninger
2007