After twenty years of creative textiles, from fiber sculpture to wearable art and church textiles, I return to painting. Gone is the reference to the figure which has informed my work for two decades. Now the work informs me. The message:  Honor the Earth.

 

In creating these paintings, I draw inspiration from Nature. Color and form arise from the garden and beyond and are filtered through personal experience, telling the hands what to do:  paint this, collage that.  Fragmented chaotic explosions can morph into calm, ordered tableaux.  Many are studies for larger paintings.  For me now, painting has become a new language with an abstract vocabulary of feelings and thoughts made visible, including vestiges of architecture, figures and textiles from the past.  The work has become more and more about the atmosphere, biodiversity and the astonishing energy that the Earth provides us with every day we're alive.

 

So long as I can speak through this work, I can find peace, happiness and hope for the future of the natural world.  It is my sincere hope that the observer will find the same.

 

 

 

                                                                                        Arlene Wilson