Artist Statement

Mary Provosty

Diptych Artist Statement #1

 

My Big Idea is contemplation. My intention is to evoke the act of contemplation on a local immediate level and expand the notion of contemplation to a cosmic level. Contemplation on the most local level is sourced from the self, the act of pausing, reflecting, gazing beyond, inward and outward.

            My visual strategy is to use my own source of photographs  because they produce the most memory from which to work, both personal memory and reflection and memory for the computer. I also have a lot of images from which to review for ideas.

            The ideas and inspiration for the images are drawn from my active dream life and my metaphoric perceptions of experience. As an artist and a visual thinker I find the origin of my image sources to be diverse, sometimes accessed through memory, sometimes through dreams, sometimes through research of an artist or topic. An example of this experience would be the way I found the idea for the stairs in diptych bottom. My intention was to have the eye of the viewer travel up the image. There are lots of ways to do this however the metaphor for rising up and out of the body, rising up into larger consciousness, is easily described through a stairway. I had flashes of Esher’s stairs, some going up but the illusion of some going down. I had a dream about choosing stairs with a select tool for my mother to walk up as she transits from this life to the next. I found an acceptable photo of a stairway to work with.

            The self sits at the bottom of the stairway surrounded by green life and decayed monuments in the form of columns. The reflection/shadow of the self rises up behind the self in the flesh. There is a portal of light filled with sky, the portal to the next layer, the top dipthych.

Images I began with included a Buddhist cave in India, an ocean wave, a cosmic swirl, a shell, stairs, sky. The predominant movement for the viewer should be to travel the eye upward and spiral out at the top.

I need to update my web site. I am not actively working on this assignment for myself but the concepts I am exploring will no doubt help me organize my next series of experiences for my new web site. I have new work to promote.