Heather Hartman

Region: South

Website: http://heatherhartmanart.com/

City / State: KNOXVILLE, TN

I am interested in the constant flux of the visual world. Through common distortions of light, shadow, and atmosphere, the familiar becomes abstracted and unfamiliar. Thus, for a fleeting moment the mundane transforms into the sublime. My work explores how these phenomena affect my own sense of perception and physical location through a material-driven painting process. Using reductive abstraction, I synthesize the transient elements of my surroundings into multilayered compositions. In the paintings, these elements allude to ever-shifting landscapes: places where things slip in and out of focus and it is difficult to locate oneself. I view these spaces as intersections of mental and physical landscapes.

My process involves painting on layers of paper and translucent polyester mesh. Working from layer to layer, bringing the elements into varying degrees of focus, allows me to explore illusionism in both paint and actual space. The resulting images are a combination of blurry, atmospheric forms with distorted shadows lying beneath washes of color and intense passages of light.