To Look… To See…

Painting is nonverbal. Please look, but if you like to read before you look, let me take a few words to help you see.

My work begins with an exploration of simple shapes and colors along with the paradoxes of simultaneous flatness / depth, light / dark, time immediate / time emerging, substantially-beautiful / invisible.

I address these issues using paint, canvas, brushes – artist materials through the ages – plus one more timeless substance – gold – all combined in a technique of my own creation.

The execution includes deeply-layered underpaint or staining, surface glazes, overpaint and varnishes in varying opacities, tints, colors and yes, the gold leaf. I like the play of light on the gold – the living quality the gold takes on.

Gold, color, paint, stroke, reflection, texture, rhythm, juxtaposition, light – all work together creating relationships. Like words and poetry, I use these relationships to communicate and create. As I nurture, develop, cherish and celebrate them, a larger world above and beyond the visual comes into the painting – the vibration. A creative dialogue with you, the viewer, is established.

I have several painting series I’m exploring simultaneously: This, Everyone, Silence, Landscape and Light / Dark. I am also working on environments to draw the viewer in by exploring scale. Large environments are to surround the viewer and very small environments permit the viewer to approach and be drawn in. Both environments allow the view to enter into the painting in different ways.

Yet my paintings are about much more than technique. The task of art is to relieve the monotonous quality of life – to reach for something true outside of ourselves. I want to give you something to take with you in your daily life.

Look…

Time and information travel quickly; meaning travels slowly is unseen. I ask questions of the unseen – your transformation as a viewer – your inner vibration.

Please quiet my words and yours. Perceive these paintings in other ways.

See…

                                   – Suze Bienaimée