Plan B (2010)
Barbara Grad
Oil on linen
“My work is inspired by a love of paint and the fiction of painting. A strong belief in the personal visual experience is reinforced by my travels and everyday living; an integration of art and life. Familiar shapes are not recognized but create ideas or metaphors. Imagery is assembled, layered and veiled to offer multiple meanings. Abstraction enables the freedom of invention. An array of graphic figuration is referenced, including: water, air and locations. these are shapes and rhythms where man-made forms merge with aerial views and reflections. It is the juxtaposition of these components which create an invented space and visual metaphor of how our culture and physical landscape has changed and continues to advance.
Understanding a constructed mysterious illusion is realized through the paint. Imagery is created through a balance of representation and abstraction, then moments of connection and disconnection appear. Using bold flat color placed adjacent to natural light and shadow, a collision of perspectives and invented spaces are instinctively discovered. It’s an uncertain territory, where a man-made place has landscape roots and respects the beauty of nature. They are landscapes with a vague familiarity of nature that hardly exists. There are no answers, only questions of the changes confronting us.
I work in a studio, in a private way, but in relation to my world experience. I use my hands and get dirty to understand the physicality of the paint. Color needs light but can also be a pleasure. It is messy thinking and graphic imagery is a way to simplify the ideas.
Reality shapes my imagination and optimistically, my imagination shapes a painted reality.” — Barbara Grad
