These works are inspired by an intense look at Kandinsky. He brought me back to the purity of abstract form and allowed the spiritual to emanate into color and form.
The black is the dark of the closed eyes. Out of the blackness and nothingness of quiet consciousness springs a myriad of thoughts and stuff. I took the freedom to free associate shapes and symbolic forms that represent archetypes that cannot be immediately catagorized as in dream consciousness. At the bottom of ourselves we know the meaning but can't quite put it to words and herein lies the magic of a visual image.
'Reaping' has the quality of an open box; but the box is also the land with vegetation and a view. Inside the box is a web and outside is the stillness of black which absorbs all.
In 'Black 6' the circle holds the landscape which appears out of the black nothingness. An amorphous figure lies in the center supported by its personal view of sky, tree, building all of which form that figures vision of the whole.
In'Black 7' the shape sits on a book with the signature of the artist. The shape itself has the simplicity of an unfolded paper and sits on the complexity
of the personal story.
In 'Waiting In Tents' the shell cup holds the ocean and the conjurers sit in tents watching events unfold.
'Stuff Rises' has an inverted structure rising. One wants to turn the picture upside down or stand with ones head upsidedown; an imbalance which creates a sort of visual koan.
Kristy Verenga
December 18, 2010