Ann-Marie Brown Statement
The spark that becomes a painting comes from lines of poetry, music, scent, light falling on things and bearing witness to the complexities of human nature.
I think that the creative self is fundamentally analogue and needs to dance with the imperfections of the real world in order to create something of substance.
There’s a slickness that I’m resisting both in what I choose to paint and the method I use to do so. Encaustic is tricky and the marks that build up on the canvas while the painting is being fought for have a value, like scars and wrinkles on a person. They are the story of becoming, written on the body.
There’s an unpredictability to the process which disrupts my intention for a piece and opens a dialogue with the emerging image. The process doesn’t allow me to visualize the painting and methodically arrive at it. This provides an opportunity for the active painting mind to push the work to a place that wasn’t consciously available.
All of this creates space within the painting. The images are a story that the viewer is invited to co-create. The medium allows for that, with the brushwork creating hard points of clarity and the encaustic work creating liminal spaces that are finished in the mind of the viewer. They are figurative paintings, grounded in reality, but function like Rorschach tests. The resolved painting contains contradictory elements within its singularity, as we do. In that way, the painting becomes a presence and an invitation to linger.
Bette Woodland Statement
From dawn until dusk, it’s the sky that defines the mood and character of the prairie landscape. Each particular moment is described by the light and its transformative effects on what we see.
These recent paintings also include portraits of the sentient domestic animals who have traditionally shared the rural community.