WHAT: A JOURNEY/Rita Edelman and Kate Whittaker Paintings at A.P.E
WHEN: April 3 -28, 2019. Artist Reception, April 12, 5-8 pm
Image: Rita Edelman
Rita Edelman Statement:
What drives me: the urge to paint.
Symbols are used to create my own visual language.
I don’t invent these images I just rearrange them.
I have long admired and appreciated the great originality of the early art of the Americas. Technical hindrance did not exist for these people, nor was there any limit to their inventiveness.
My paintings suggest rather than define. I make layer on layer of marks… a web, if you will. Hopefully the viewer will see layer on layer of meaning. The paintings do not yield themselves to casual scrutiny.
They require a few moments of contemplation. I call them “slow release works”. My work depends on an intuitive response. It’s symbols are ambiguous and are open to multiple interpretations.
Kate Whittaker Statement: I rarely, if ever, know what a painting will become when I begin. The start provides the same thrill of traveling to a country you know little about. My paintings are closely linked to the emotions and sensual experiences of my travels, the yearning to create an image that might conjure what I felt about a place, not just what I witnessed. As such, the physicality of the paint itself—how it sits upon the panel or canvas, how one pigment interacts with another, the effect of water on its polymers, and so on—is largely what dictates a painting's early direction. The process is a dance of sorts, leading, following, listening, acting. It always requires a lot of patience and, at least the way I paint, a surprising amount of stamina.
A painting can have as many as forty layers or more, each with some mark or brush stroke that may be covered over only to reappear when upper most layers are sanded down. I love the unexpectedness of this, like walking in a field and a stone from an ancient foundation surprises your foot. And this becomes part of the painting's narrative—a remanence of sorts.
My training in the geological sciences has strongly effected my work, particularly in the subtle narratives that lie beneath a layer, as well as its stratigraphy and horizons. The micaceous paint too—that changes with the light or your position relative to the surface—brings a wonderful temporal sense to a landscape. Calligraphy, antiquity, nature's patterns, all are strongly situated in my art and form its foundation.
