Deborah Frankel Reese | Paintings

Artist's Statement

My paintings are executed in oils, with the frequent addition of charcoal, graphite, ink or torn paper for textural and linear emphasis. The works evolve from extensive underpaintings and glazes, which, while resulting in certain preserved 'accidents' also serve as inspiration for the final more deliberate renderings. All of the paintings represent my ongoing involvement with strong colors and textures, where shadow and form are folded over each other, highlighted, or rubbed away, resulting in the multi-layered pieces that define my work.

After many years of concentrating on the figure and oversized botanicals, recently I have taken landscape as a primary focus -- a response to the pattern, texture, and emotion of the Vermont natural terrain which has so wonderfully surrounded my everyday life for eight years. Over the past several years, composition, color, texture and the use of glazes and layering have all superseded subject when I sit down at the easel. I find that the study of landscape allows me to shift between reality and abstraction, but without losing a sense of time and place. In the studio, I find myself slouching towards the non-traditional, and I am curious to see where I will end up. I have always been inspired by the painters Mark Rothko and George Inness and, more recently, by Vermont’s own Eric Aho.