NICOLE STRASBURG
OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, JULY 25, 2004, FROM 5 - 7PM
Nicole Strasburg loves water.
She’s born under the sign of Aquarius.
She’s aware that we’re each seventy percent water and that the earth’s surface is covered with water in that same proportion.
She makes paintings of water which are not depictions of beach and sea, but which provide an experience of water and its interaction with sky and shore.
As in her earthscapes, Strasburg enters the element she paints, empathazing with its structure and its language. She swims every day, smooth and fast, in a muscular meditation on water and its senses.
“Being close to the Pacific Ocean, the sun and mountains have influenced me significantly. My paintings become an homage to the solace I seek in the natural surroundings. They represent a meditation and journey of self-discovery through my physical and spiritual dialogue with nature. I seek through my paintings the quiet rapture and the distinct feeling I know from being in the water - while floating, pulling, gliding through watery sounds. It is primal, womblike and comforting.”
In these paintings, water meets sky, sky gathers above to return again, water sculpts furrows and smoothes into that liquid sand at the edge of the ocean. Her compositions are endlessly variable, their surfaces glinting and rippling, the directional short strokes like warp and woof, painted, sanded, glazed, painted, sanded again and painted until they glow. After 10 hour days of painting, she says she feels grateful to be contemplating this natural beauty, and, evoking its images, she is channeling its energy, herself a vessel for the elements she articulates.
- Pamela Zwehl-Burke
Poetry by Hillary Hauser, principal organizer of Heal the Ocean will accompany the exhibition.
