Plausible
Artist Statement
This body of work began with collage applied in the manner of automatic drawing, bypassing rational thought and conscious control. This method allows me to create a surface that suggests chaos. In this instance, chaos is marked by a lack of discernible pattern, linear movement, and structure. I allow and coax forms to emerge from the chaos. Like a character in a Somerset Maugham novel, I search the chaos for meaning and finish the painting when I reach a point of contentment. The work is not meant to be understandable, just plausible.
Watch artist talk youtu.be/uzEUaVcV1r8.
Artist Statement
This body of work began with collage applied in the manner of automatic drawing, bypassing rational thought and conscious control. This method allows me to create a surface that suggests chaos. In this instance, chaos is marked by a lack of discernible pattern, linear movement, and structure. I allow and coax forms to emerge from the chaos. Like a character in a Somerset Maugham novel, I search the chaos for meaning and finish the painting when I reach a point of contentment. The work is not meant to be understandable, just plausible.
Watch artist talk youtu.be/uzEUaVcV1r8.
36" x 30" Mixed Media Paintings
10" x 8" Studies
Pricing & Shipping
36" x 30" $1,800, Shipping in U.S. $150
10" x 8" $150, Shipping U.S. $30
How to Purchase: Purchase on-line from Artspace (https://artspacerva.square.site/). Email me ([email protected]) and I will contact you to arrange shipping.
36" x 30" $1,800, Shipping in U.S. $150
10" x 8" $150, Shipping U.S. $30
How to Purchase: Purchase on-line from Artspace (https://artspacerva.square.site/). Email me ([email protected]) and I will contact you to arrange shipping.
Martha Prideaux, Plausible, Artist Talk Notes, 10/26/2024, Artspace, Richmond
I’m going to start with the easy part - how these paintings were made and then I’ll tackle the hard part - what these paintings mean to me
Easy Part - How these paintings were made
*I ordered custom-made cradled wood panels 36 x 30
*I covered them with collage. Packaging, hand painted & printed papers, fabric, found papers, etc,. I tried to apply the collage in a manner akin to automatic drawing, bypassing rational thought and conscious control.
*Then I would look at it and start coaxing some forms and structure to emerge. I used oil paint mixed with cold wax medium, drawing tools, and more collage to do this.
*Most of this work ended up with an underlying grid structure. (show the yellow anomaly)
Hard Part - Why? Is there any meaning here?
*This is very difficult and I usually don’t like to share much personal information. I’m going to go out on a limb today and hope that the adage, the personal is universal, is true.
*I’ll start with a couple of artists who influenced me. *I’m an admirer of the abstract expressionist painter Brice Marden. I took the title of this show, plausible, from this Brice Marden quote:
“One of the things I think about is that the artist is some sort of intermediary for the image. The process is really about feeling and trying to understand what’s out there and how you’re responding to it and getting it down so it can be communicated. The plane at one point is chaos or the miasma (my-as-muh), and you work it up just so that there’s an image. The chaos becomes understandable, or you can see it in some way that isn’t necessarily understandable, but it’s plausible. You have to make some form out of it. And you’re just a sensitive being and you helped evolve that form. I think if there’s a real working idea for me it’s letting the image come up out of the unknown rather than taking some known thing and applying to the plane defining it.”
He felt that painters were "searching to understand but never know". I like that his work was a combination of formal and romantic elements. I like that he didn’t want his work to be too academic even though he went to Yale. Also, he liked the grid, and he identified with landscape.
Another influence is the novelist Somerset Maugham. I was in my 40’s when I had some insomnia (maybe I was ironically having an existential crisis at the time?) and pulled a dusty copy of The Razors Edge off of my parent’s bookshelf. That led to an independent study of Somerset Maugham and his novels. Many of his characters search for the meaning of life but never really find it. Instead, they find some form of contentment. Somerset Maugham himself talked about living with a humorous resignation.
So, Marden and Maugham, and now Prideaux, were searching the chaos, if you will, for something. No one ever really found meaning but they all found something that they can live with: a form, a structure, a circumstance, something plausible.