ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Art is my way of life. It is how I understand myself and others, explore ideas, celebrate Life, and join in the cultural dialogue about the challenges we face and the emerging new story.

My work has always been about energy: mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, from the subtle to the destructive.

I watch the sky, and all of nature’s changing colors, look at art, read, take pictures and clip photographs, collect post cards, make sketches and notes… I choose my format and materials but, before the empty surface on which I work, I let go of planning and open to what comes out. What arrivals feels both familiar and strange. I feel I am following, more than choosing and must then work to integrate and offer what has come.

In 2010 I was prepared for another summer doing watercolors of the Etruscan vase shapes I had been using for years. The language I had developed of interior, exterior, and boundary, crossed by the energy of mark and color, gave me endless space, the limitations were a doorway.

Then the Gulf Deepwater Horizon oil spill began. Surrounded by the beauty of the Umbrian landscape where we were living, each day I checked to see if the Earth’s black hemorrhage into the blue waters had been stopped; Gaia was bleeding. Broken hearted, my anger and despair overwhelmed my ability to use the rainbow of colors on my palette.

Stopped in my tracks, the confrontation returned me to black and white with the important greys between. I worked on plastic drafting film, a product of the oil we all use and endangering life in the Gulf. With a single figure in each rectangle, standing, like my vase paintings, they kept coming, as did the spill. Later, adding light and narrative, then taking the figures into the digital world allowed me to combine traditional drawing with new possibilities.

This body of work was my means of coming back to Life, emerging in a new way, transformed by my own shadow and light, and by the shadow of what our human activities are doing to the planet, the evolution by chance of the past, and the light of our enormous potential to choose conscious evolution and a new story today and every day.

This work has given me the great pleasure of collaboration. Ezra and Jason Dufair: initial digital development;  Mitch Jozekowski: Indiana Ash boxes, James Long: continued digital development; Dan McClannen of Redipix.com and the constant support, problem solving and patience of my husband, painter, Al Pounders, made this installation possible. I am forever grateful for all they had to offer and for the use of wonderful NASA, NOAA, and other government agency photographs.

– Loren Olson