Jane Hiatt

Artist Statement, 9.16.16

In these paintings there is a need to deal directly with color. Whatever forms and shapes transpired originated from the ease of the wrist. Within the comfort of a single brushstroke that either curves or carries on straight; forms which are linear in origin but once completed become planar and almost architectural. The process is slow and foggy at first, thin layers of paint are applied one by one in clear pastel pools. The conversation of color and a thick, toothy rectangle of paper has its own brightening ideas about what it will be. Soggy forms swing and elongate until they become stuck. Pastel pools solidify into a bright and clamorous tangle of space and plane. Trying as I go to somehow overcome that perceptual gap between what is in the world and how I perceive it. I want to see the world as it has never been seen before, I want to invent a new color that has never been seen by anyone, and to understand what wisdom the metaphor of color can teach us. I have come to believe this wisdom lies embedded in the fact of simultaneous contrast. Two colors or ideas that are completely opposite yet completely true when placed side by side, or held in one’s mind, become brighter and more true to themselves in lieu of one another. Color reflects this lesson in a myriad of ways, representing many contrasting ideas – light and object, subjective and universal, ephemeral and concrete, worlds internal and external.