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Paintingsdirect.com
Floribundus
by Vanessa Conte

 
The defined image of a landscape we once knew blurs at the edges and distorts over time. The rolling hills of summers past become greener or more faded, and the boisterous city block from our childhood becomes tamer or more daunting the more we recall it from our memory. The artists in this month's exhibition compose landscapes that exist somewhere on the fringe of our recollections, where a tree can be a bird, or an eye can be an ocean.

Featuring work by Catherine Ramey, Dorothy Stewart and Mitchell Rosenzweig.

Catherine Ramey

The process of creating the work itself is what holds most significance for Catherine Ramey. Ramey's process is not predetermined; rather it is an emotional and spiritual consideration of movement, mortality and rebirth. Ramey builds her compositions with layers of oil paint or gouache until the image dissolves into abstraction. While she is painting, the artist repeats a phrase in her head that she will meditate on. These groups of words vary from simple to complex, such as "field light" or "resolves in shifting containment."

Ramey's Fecundity Series best illustrates her gradual method of painting, and reinforces the meaning of her imagery. Each painting is a portrayal of flowers from her fruitful garden in upstate New York. This organic subject suits the title of the series, Fecundity, which means intellectual and physical fertility. The clarity of the flowers dissipates as the artist drifts into her thoughts, and the work becomes rich with paint. "I start with a form, but the form is no more or less important than the feeling that surrounds it and the deeper, more enduring intangible, that cradles that feeling."

Ramey's landscapes are not ruminations on a physical place, but metaphorical tableaus of her memory. They are recordings of her creative process, composed from "layers and layers of maneuvers, one gesture colliding with another until their interactions make something worthwhile."