Inside Out

Artist Statement

These works are painted in a gestural, expressive manner, embracing the clumsy and unfinished as well as refined and detailed elements, since I find both qualities woven throughout life, they are forces throughout my work. Paint is my primary artistic medium and language. For me, the painting process mimics life in its’ beautiful and confounding nature.

In this group of paintings, I looked for a sense of immediacy and intimacy in the each invented space.  Each piece is a new environment, not repeated, but I look for times when works begin to speak to each other.  For instance, color and mark-making can link them visually to each other, or similar themes.  Particularly with these paintings I see threads of humor (sometimes dark) and an imaginative mindset, that are emerging repeatedly as my work and ideas evolve.

The paintings presented are influenced by life events, dreams, landscapes, and stories. Some of the works, like ‘Orpheus Turns Around’, Moses, and One Day in Eden are contemporary takes on stories and ancient myths.  Others, such as; ‘John Laurie’s Field’, ‘Willow Run’,  and A Dream I Had In 1989 are visceral memories, that for me, have a mythic quality.  These works of places and events from personal history come from the inside; the home, the body, the mind, and they look out at the world in its’ complexity.  ‘Iowa’ is an example of this as I thought of my own home and imagined the devastation in Iowa as tornadoes destroyed homes, belongings, and the landscape, but also imagining the terrible beauty of the moment before a storm hits, when the air is electric.

-Lin Price-