Heather Hartman
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.