Collection Notes

If I am going to do this blog, I want to start with at least a little logic.  
So I will start off with the collection notes to the exhibition I did in 2009 at Tourette Sur Loup at Le Chateau.  Since that time, I have left painting and taken up engraving to the exclusion of every other art form save photography.    

But reading over this synopsis I did with a friend, I think it largely holds true for me now even though one could say I have gone through a long fallow period since then.  I would question "the exciting , emerging creator" bit.  That's a bit rich.  

But….. still, once an artist always an artist, I believe .   

I will get back to the first collections on the theme of "intimacy" later on in the blog.  

Mary PAYNE

Artiste, Plasticienne

The patina of an old wall, the gash in the trunk of a tree, the color of a dove’s wing…  these are some of the sources that inspire the art of Mary Payne.   

From these impressions, the artist creates pieces that vary from small, sometimes sensual images in nuanced, delicate tones to bold, colorful, even chaotic expressions. Using ancient motifs as a point of departure, Mary Payne paints from the circle, the crevasse, the almond, the “Y” for example, all elemental forms found in nature, which have the power to inspire us directly.   

In the collection are works based on textural interest, as in the "Ciacatrice" series, a multilayered work, which developed from the formation of rifts in the paper as the artist worked the material. These scars evoke the concept of aging and it's potential for beauty and force.  And in this first series, we see the idea of the secret, hidden place, as a metaphor for human connection and the struggle to be revealed to one another.

In the new collection of works on canvas, the artist departs from the theme of intimacy found in the small format pieces.   With the larger works echoing "Abstract Expressionism" of the anti- figurative school of New York, we see a purer form of abstraction.  Many of the large works play on the tension between control and its loss.  The artist feels that true abstraction is the artist getting out of the way and waiting for" an honest moment to arrive".   Always in all the work shown by Ms Payne there is an almost musical sense of composition, harmony and resolution.  Always there is attention to color as a driving force.   

For this artist, to create is to go to an unknown domain of new sensations, nuances and unforeseen movements.  Out of this universe, come her revelations of, the ephemeral, the fragile, and the mysterious.   We invite you to plunge into her world  and to discover an exciting, emerging creator.