Words from Artist Paula Overbay
So happy to have Paula Overbay on the blog this week. I have been a fan for quite a while.
“Impermanence is the very fragrance of our days” is Rainer Maria Rilke’s elegant way of speaking about inevitable change, something that has threaded its way through my work from the beginning. The idea continued to compress, concentrating on wind and rain and clouds and has shifted into molecules. Molecules as metaphor: molecules growing in rain clouds or in our bodies pulsing or in the constellations moving. How did this happen? I didn’t plan on making smaller and smaller paintings with smaller and smaller dots. I wanted to make monumental work. You know; the important stuff…..
While at the MacDowell Colony in NH some years ago I noticed a large pod of something on my porch wall. It slowly unfurled into luminous green wings with black spots and dried off in the sun. A lunar moth. It went off for its day of living and I went off to work. Several years later I was making paintings with black dots and several years after that I learned about luminosity. After absorbing luminosity I found myself sitting bored for two weeks at the Ragdale Colony in IL. Nothing was worth doing. My eyes rested finally on the gray work table in front of me and I noticed the marks and dots and stray blobs left by other colonists. I started copying them and before the six weeks were over I had evolved into the dot patterns that continue to energize my compositions.
Composition is the name of the game for me: mass, pattern, line, color, and value with movement given priority. I set up a problem by scattering elements on a prepared ground and try to avoid making important compositional relationships for as long as possible. When I am finally cornered into making decisions about connections I have to sit and look. Looking takes up about 60% of the time and painting takes the remainder.
I have followed Cy Twombly, Paul Klee, Roberto Matta and Friedrick Hundertwasser for as long as I can remember. I became a fan of Janice Caswell only recently.
They all speak of breathing and moving freely; of invention and play. Looking at Klee’s “Twitter Machine” made me think about images moving of their own volition.
