Artist Statement

My current series explores the marriage and divorce of line and texture and the tension between their polarities. It evolved over a nine month period, through play and experimentation on canvas using acrylic and oil paints. After a two year, total absence from art, I relocated my studio and began this series working in a different way. My eariler work had been autobiographical and narrative dealing mainly with issues of gender, ethnicity and nationality. This series is about beauty and is particular in its Islamic and Indian art influence. Here, the two cultures I grew up with, Middle Eastern and Western, merge. Warm color, arabesque and oriental motifs coincide with distant, cool color abstract.

In Twombly, I found intimacy with the canvas. In Motherwell, boldness, strength and confidence and with Pollock, I engaged in play. Abstract Exressionism became a meditation and a bridget to a new perspective. Letting the paint take control, I spent long hours observing it while applying it to the surface. I realized that often the paint did better than what I would have done. 

In the midst of this process, images that were drawn from my daily trip to the studio emerged from the paint. Out of my home in Woodland Hills, through Topanga Canyon and out along the Pacific Coast Highway, the drive always seems like I am seeing it for the first time. I stop occasionally along the shoulder to look more closely at what I have passed. Inside the random, heavy textures of the Topanga Mountains I see infinite plants, flowers and weeds, seemingly insignificant in so many ways, yet well-calculated and meticulously designed. The long winding road transforms to a single line and divides the ocean from the sky. As I arrive in Santa Monica, silhouttes of palms and cypresses reveal themselves and appear trapped in the bright typical sun of Southern California.

Each of these layered paintings started with random actions: throwing, pouring, dripping, spraying and mixing different mediums, to name a few. I worked on several large canvases simultaneiously. In fact, i never knew what I was going to paint. Within all that I knew, I needed to attain something I vaguely perceived and work my way toward it. There are at least four to five paintings under each one with the last not necessarily more attractive than the others. As they changed constantly, I left the process visible, rather than hiding or masking it, to allow the viewer to enter the paiting and reenact it.

Artwork by Lidia Shaddow