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.