Lexiblakegilbert's photostream

I am interested in how visual symbols aggragate to set a scene, or tell a story. It is fascinating how rich this language of visual symbols is, and how culturally pervasive.

This body of work ties together as scenes from an umbrella story: the potion-making of a witch. The witch lives in a landscape of late summer, of backyard briars and private tasks. She has an intuitive sense of what ingredients can be gathered and then combined, with a ‘magic’ transformation as the goal. I see the arrangement of flora, etc. on a canvas as some process where there are ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’, and the witch is always seeking the moment of correctness that will result in a sum becoming more than its parts. I imagine lasers of light and flying glitter at this moment, like when Princess Adora chants her magic words and emerges from a shower of gold as She-Ra.

I see interesting parallels in this action of ‘spellwork’ with my particular generation. There is some connection that comes from growing up in a popular culture filled with glowing lasers and fantastical Henson characters. Even the most conservative members of my peer group would not blink an eye as their WOW character steps into a shiny orb and is able to absorb its power through the contact: for us, there is a perfect logic to it. But wouldn’t a conservative person be surprised when confronted with how easily they intuit something close to witchcraft? I like to suggest a compromise to fantasy in my work, a country closer to magical realism.

Kiki Smith and Joanna Newsom, the freak folk artists and the neo-goths: all have created worlds of a specific feminine resonance that I want to join. We have moved beyond felt owls and the nostalgic girly sappiness of ‘princess power’ into a realm that may be soft and vivid, atmospherically gentle and wild all at once. I choose the ‘ingredients’ of my ‘spells’ thusly. I want to communicate the delicate beauty in the natural lines of tangled wildflowers, and remind the viewer that there can be poison there, a touch could draw blood. I love how line and shape and color symbolically do this job. A jagged line feels dangerous, and flashes of fluorescent orange in a field of flesh tones brings menace to a story that is otherwise calm. The fluororescents’ spatial otherworldliness is the magic itself.

My interests are a direct product of the re-evaluation that has been given in the last decade to notions of Beauty. The Kantian seatbelt sign is off, and we are now free to move about the cabin- and enjoy the transports of representation, of a story. A carefully composed scene can be worn like a costume, a new experience: and I aspire for my paintings the same participation of escape.