Vase Water is a diaristic show–a collection of experiences, techniques, and visions describing a perceived world. Sometimes, it is an amalgam of fiction and reality–a bat transforms into an orange glow in Wig Wag. Or it is often an ode to an artist like Manet–his last flower paintings, or Max Ernst–his collages. Indeed, it is a way to translate an inner world into color and form. I use divergent ways of making to create harmonious sets of paintings unified by hue, recurrent shapes, and themes. What emerges is an exploration of wanderings and associations to record a subjective experience and imagination, to make that felt, and to play with a painting’s potential.

These paintings were made primarily in Bovina, New York, and the outside–the birds, the trees, and the friends I made there–entered the paintings and influenced their forms. Blissful Countryside is a kitchen sink painting: the remnants and colors of the other pieces in Vase Water migrated into its frame, becoming the map or key to this set of works. The cedar waxwing’s feathered breast, a gentle gradient of sienna to sea gray, built the arc in Cranberry Sauce.

Broken remnants of an eastern tiger swallowtail transformed into Xiidra. An apocryphal story from the local car mechanic: John Lennon lay on a hill in the nearby town and declared, “A man could die here”, seeped in and transmuted into an underlying rhythm within the suite of paintings. And a dense forestscape in the distance drifted into the pointillist windows of Happy Valley. These observations and idiosyncrasies, along with the joyful scrutiny of painting’s possibilities, brought forth the materialization of Vase water.

(Kathryn Kerr)