Artwork Description
Marietta Patricia Leis – Sanctuary
Dimensions: 8 x 8 x 3″
Year:
Medium: oil on birch
There is an ancient Eastern tradition of poetry as an idea of minimal surface texture, with it’s complexities hidden at the bottom of the pool, under the bank, a dark old lurking, no fancy flavor. There is a complexity deep within that context for the reader to ferret out. One must allow to be absorbed by the work not straining to fathom it. This is best done with silent contemplation.
Zen says, “…the ideas of the poet should be noble and simple.” So it is that my paintings are noticeably influenced by these concepts. Beyond this I am happily entrenched in the formal properties of the painting process—color, edge, space, form and composition. Paint and painting delight me. The colors shine in magical ways transfusing the surface and each other. I layer them on until I capture just the right note, or rather the music between the notes.
My lush surfaces try to capture the elegance I seek and hold the viewer long enough where he/she will probe further. Like poetry, deep listening is fundamental for the viewer of my reductive multimedia art.
My oil paintings are soaked in blue. This blue immersion began in 2001 when I was an Artist in Residence at Crater Lake, Oregon— the deepest and bluest lake in the US. I realized then how thoroughly color, as an optical experience, filters through cultural values and shapes the way we see the world. Blue has infiltrated our psyches be it in the sea or the sky, the Virgin Mary’s garb or the workingman’s Levi’s, Chinese porcelain or Japanese textiles. I have totally—and absolutely—yielded to this reality. These paintings can exclaim “blue” one painting at a time, but more often the blue reverberates two, four, six or more paintings at a time. The wood formats on which they are painted typically angle and recede to the wall while their painted surfaces appear to float in front of the wall. There is a paradox between the sharp edginess of the painting formats and their gentle hovering. The installation is integral to the intention of the work. The configurations are not meant to be static but rather reinvented at each venue. The tension among the pieces of each grouping and between the different groupings themselves is a vital transformative element. On a rare occasion there is a red painting to interrupt a sense of complacency. The installations can create a feeling of balance or imbalance, rootedness or suspension by being arranged vertically, linearly, as a stepladder, or in ways yet unknown. Beyond all this, I am happily entrenched in the formal properties of the painting process—color, edge, space, form and composition.