Sara Stites
Mixing representational images with improvisational abstraction is a signature of my recent work. I am not telling one story, precisely, but am describing the feeling of being within a story, one with an undecided outcome and one that is decidedly feminine.
Using visual pastiches and different styles in translucent layers, I build an architecture, an underlying structure, a thickening of experience using color and figuration. This psychologically charged landscape explores the relationship between humans and the world in an open-ended inquiry. Exotic color choices and cartoonish figuration overlay a sense of the comedic.
Eroticism, the subconscious, automatic drawing, clearly refer to surrealism. This is natural as I have always loved de Chirico, even his crazy late works. The heavy black line may come from admiration for Max Beckmann. I relate to the irreverence of Paul McCarthy and caricatures of Barry McGee. These influences, and others, are filtered through my vantage point of growing up in midcentury America, an observer, anti-hero, survivor.
"I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it-drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea." Willem de Kooning
