LAURA PAULINI |
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Artist's Statement Opposites attract. We yearn for stability and security, but our desire for variety and adventure invites risk. We know that setting goals and sticking to them will get results, yet we give in to the pleasure of breaking rules we ourselves have deliberately crafted. While there is something satisfying about being first, no one is immune to the charm of objects worn and marked with the history of their use. Perhaps that is why we are so attracted to ruins: they hold the quest for completion within a man-made object against the inevitable changes to that object brought over time. My current geometric abstractions explore this opposition quite directly. The rows of colored lines - created by placing individual dots of egg tempera paint onto a wooden panel with the tip of a chopstick - represent order, structure, and growth. The dots themselves - 1/8" in diameter, slightly irregular, and at times completely absent - represent fracture, permeability, and decay. Together, they cohere to create an image of iconic stillness while retaining a sense of incompleteness and change. Previous work includes the white square, textured paintings, each 12" square - created as a series of 50 completed in 2006. Each of these paintings was completed in a single sitting on a single day using a different, non-art making tool (chopstick, dental pick, feather, straw, etc.). I made the marks across the surface, left to right and top to bottom, as if writing. Although I set the marks down one by one in sequential lines, their position and size varied slightly one to the other. These variations, which I accepted and even welcomed, added up to become waves which ripple across the surface, waxing and waning. They distort and free the underlying grid structure of the square while staying safe inside its shape. — Laura Paulini |