| Figures in Absentia |
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| November 5th, 2009 - November 17th, 2009 |
| Reception: Thursday, November 5th, 6-8PM |
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I find people to be the most curious and demanding subjects. It can be very difficult,if not impossible, to represent someone completely to make a true portrait. In each painting I try to get down one thing about the models who sit for me; a glance, a mood, the conversation between us in the studio. It is an attempt to make
a visual record about the air of someone who is continuously changing. I paint figures in spatial voids so that they are not tied to any one place. But in my most recent paintings, I have been playing with the idea that when something is everywhere, it becomes nowhere in particular. A floor joining a wall, a highway, and a road in the woods are all stages of familiar yet anonymous landscapes. This series began with single-figure compositions. When I moved to multi-figure paintings it was purely for compositional reasons, but through that process I found a different way to deal with the same problem of representing an individual. By pulling that individual apart into 6 or 7 versions of themselves,
I could take all the information that had been going into
the single figure, and stretch it into a time lapse memoir of movement and mood. I am interested in people who I can never get right, who I can’t pin down. I paint them over and over again. This puzzle generates enough inspiration for an entire series. I continue to
try and figure them out.
Jane Lafarge Hamill |
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