Moira Carlson:Paintings

I have a fascination with visual space. There is something about the illusion of depth on a two dimensional surface that always captures my attention. I find it to be both entertaining and mysterious. It is such fun to experiment with the possibilities. I am delighted by the dance of shadow and light and reflection. Particular visual images speak to me and I am drawn to things both quirky and humorous. Although my work could be characterized as generally 'realistic', I have no interest in simply reproducing a scene. I want to play with it, ask questions, kick the tires, turn this image that we think is 'reality' over a few times and see what I can learn from it.

There are so many artists whose work I admire and who have inspired me to develop my own voice. My list of influences would include Degas, Scott Fraser, Hokusai, Douglas Johnson, Lisa Lichtenfels, René Magritte, Monet, Giorgio Morandi, Georgia O'Keefe, Mary Pratt, Roxanne Swentzell and Vermeer. We are blessed to be living in an age where seeing the work of artists both past and present is easier than it has ever been. Other great artists are nameless but have been equally influential—quilt makers, commercial illustrators, potters and Tai Chi dancers. I will gratefully take my inspiration wherever I may find it.

I am always a little surprised when I complete a painting because it is never quite what I was expecting. That is the fun of it. It is this strange dance that occurs during the act of painting --right brain, left brain, taking dictation, however you want to think of it-- that keeps me coming back. I think that I am always searching for the still point, the sweet spot. John Cage said "To see, one must go beyond the imagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap."

I have the following quotation from Hokusai on the wall of my studio. Sometimes I think that I have been working at this stuff for a very long time. Hokusai reminds me that I am just beginning.

"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all that I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes, and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made more progress, at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things, at a hundred I shall have reached a marvelous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive."

--Hokusai