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Artist’s Statement My works’ focus is dictated by place, and the work shown in this sampling provides evidence of my continuing search for structure in landscape painting. Working outdoors assures me of two things: absolute concentration, and a sense of urgency which causes me to distill the land to irreducible forms. Because I began as an abstract painter, I have always been attentive to the ideas served up by process. My plein-air search for equivalents beyond the merely allusive results in the feeling that abstractions are masquerading as landscape – twice and sometimes thrice removed from the natural forms which provoked them! For the first half of my painting life, the humid East Coast exercised a kind of tyranny over my landscape painting, veiling in damp air and soft shared edges the order I longed to find in natural forms. Upon moving west in 1985, I suddenly had to deal with dry air and clear light, which defined forms in terms of absolute light and absolute dark. Painting such contrasts revealed to me a tension between geometry in depth, and geometry on the surface of the canvas, the balancing of which had been my underlying intention, always, in composing from nature. The East/West dichotomy suggested to me that in traveling more, not less, I might uncover my voice even more honestly and intensely. Painting with Richard Diebenkorn in 1986, then working all over Montanan, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado sharpened my edges, closed down panoramas, and pushed through the autobiographical to the abstract, dominating my landscapes as tyrannically as the East once had. When I returned to the Hudson River Valley, Martha’s Vineyard, South Carolina, and Maine, these once-familiar places had become exotic to me. I concluded that I had changed, not the places painted. I realized I was painting internalized subjects -- blissful or terrifying, in deepest memory of first emotions – and that I had always attempted to recreate these primal motifs in new places, no matter the continent or square foot upon which I had placed an easel. The more exotic the jolt of the unfamiliar, the more authentic and direct the access to the mental furniture of unconscious visual memory, and the higher the voltage of my response on canvas. Each new virgin territory I visit summons to the surface richer, more personal and irreducible forms stored in pre-verbal memories of first-sense impressions – the points of an inner compass I now trust most. Joellyn Duesberry, August 2005 Additional information: |
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images, copy and artwork throughout this website are copyrighted by
the artist. © 2006-2008 Joellyn Duesberry |
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