ARTISTS STATEMENT

The experience of painting is about so many things.  Wrapping one's eye around the arm of a chair or a cloud in the universe and expressing it in the color and value that makes it uniquely your vision is a miracle that fills one with awe.

Painting is using my brush as a key to enter the soul of what I am creating.  Through some mystical happening, I join the object of my artistic focus in a chemistry that I neither understand nor intend.  And the result is some amalgamation of our souls - the unique way that we connect  at this moment.  A oneness of artist and art.  Whether it is a chair or a poppy or an abstraction, the painting pulls me to and fro as I wrestle with its evolution.

I love to work with mediums where I am in “touch with the Medium”.  Pastels and oil sticks and encaustics delight me.  I can grab them and go right to the canvas at hand and make my mark with a physical satisfaction.   Often I have no idea into what that mark will eventually evolve .  The process of the painting is at work, and I follow it where it leads me.

And more and more it leads me through a haze, an atmosphere, to a place where art and soul meet.  There are few separations here, but there can be grand swellings of color and shape often shifting into subtle, gentle nuances.  And this always delights my soul.

-- Joyce Bennett Van Horn