Artisan Studios & Gallery
Britta Kathmeyer
“Painting is silence of thought and music of sight”
Orphan Pamuk
Since 2017 I have been creating paintings and drawings of imaginary bowls and vessels, minimal works that explore the emotional quality of objects. I am drawn to the simple shape of a bowl that so perfectly expresses yin and yang, the philosophical concept that describes the complementary principle of opposite forces in nature. A bowl is associated with giving and receiving, with healing, holding, nurturing. According to the Persian poet Rumi its shape refers to the human soul. Painting a bowl is a meditative practice helping me to stay centered as I take in the crises and changes all around.
My abstract paintings are an attempt to communicate the energy and essence of both my inner life and events that are unfolding around me. The personal and political are culminating in form, color, and movement on a two dimensional surface. Meditation is part of my creative process as I sit in silence before I begin new work. Rather than having a specific image or composition in mind, the choice of color and the movement of strokes and marks have an energetic source and are spontaneous. As I build the surface through layers of adding and detracting, creating and destroying, forms and structures reveal themselves. In this process I embrace accidents, which pose further questions and propel the conversation of gestures along into time and space.
“If you look at a vase, what makes it a vase?
Is it the material, the clay, the pottery?
It is the empty, silent space inside
That the clay surrounds.”