Spruce Original by Libby Sipe
Acrylic
This abstract piece began as a calm landscape that quickly spiralled into a forest fire on the canvas. Allowing my intuition to guide my painting, I was pushed to create a piece in response to the intense heat and forest fires that are cropping up on the west coast of the United States. With only a single tree visible among the flames it feels hopeless for recovery. But there are glimpses of the original landscape behind the flames, leading to a notion of hope. Albeit a small one.
Inspired by the constant fluctuation of memory and emotional imagination, my paintings encapsulate the intense colours and abstracted movements of the human psyche. Using acrylic paints, cyanography, and collage I create abstracted dreamlike portraits that capture elements of the fluctuating nature of the spirit and reflect on the emotions embedded in human psychology.The intent of my paintings is to draw the mind of the viewer to a personal and emotional mental space where they are inspired to reflect on how their memories appear to them. Furthermore, I’m fascinated with the entanglement of emotion and imagination within personal memories. The materials that I have chosen to work with often reflect this relationship between the corporeal world and the reveries of the mind.The incorporation of the cyanotype into the painting represents the partial photographic nature of the mind, while the paint in its varying thickness blurs and distorts the image while the colours inspire an emotional reaction within the viewer. Working in multiple layers with a combination of delicate and purposeful markings paired with heavy handed brush strokes and scraped paint, I create a polarity within my work to showcase the way memories slowly atrophy.
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