Elizabeth

Weber

MFA Painting

My work distills formal elements gleaned from various sources including art history, historical archives, and print media. Responding intuitively to these elements, I reorganize and repeat them onto canvas and paper, manipulating the lines and forms to establish new visual relationships. Layering and repetition acknowledge in-between spaces that result in abstractions, the surfaces of which conceal the history of process beneath. The work is not pre-visualized; the generative processes of drawing and painting influence the outcome. Sometimes I apply paint thinly as a wash of color and at other times I cover the surface with thick patches of paint. Both transparent and opaque layers build forms, and I fragment and obscure these in the process. My paintings create tension through the simultaneous illusion of depth and the assertion of the canvas’s flatness, calling attention to the process of painting. The compositions conflate exterior and interior spaces; solid, wide, and narrow, as well as broken lines, suggest transitional spaces and objects within actual, imagined, and psychological interiors.