Merrilee H. Challiss
Region: South
All of my work is about nature. I paint my mind’s tableaux of
mostly imagined realms to depict how I see the connections
between natural and invisible worlds. I feel and see all natural
systems, Man, Animal, and Spirit, constantly overlapping and
coexisting on conscious and unconscious planes. In my paintings,
I layer and overlap images, expressing my internal conflict with
order and chaos and depicting a world I feel to be out of balance,
while questioning where I myself might be situated in that same
spectrum. Just as I have learned most of my life’s lessons to date
obliquely, so too have the images come to me—from the edges,
the margins, into the center. I locate myself (and my role as artist)
in the liminal realms, with shamanism, where the spirit and the
unconscious trump our waking reality.
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