C. Morey de Morand
ARTIST Q & A at Palette Contemporary, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA:
Please explain to us the materials and processes you use. What effect do your specific materials and processes have on your work?
Constructed with acrylic mediums, pigments, and marble dust on canvas, these visual poems in time are made by a kind of intuitive synthesis.
The tension between the formal and the uneven, or the handmade aspect of painting, on scrutiny, releases a heightened awareness of the particularity of each pigment and how it is applied. This allows the light falling across the surface to emphasize its complexity. Minute differences make the lines dance. Visually it becomes unstable and open. The formal balance plays with the accidents inherent in its fabrication.
Intense colors, the play of pigments and acrylic mediums make illusions of vast distance, then suddenly surface details concentrate the attention. Texture, brush marks, translucence are used precisely as signifiers that somewhere there is another dimension.
The painting floats in infinite space, connecting energy, intellect, and emotions. Shifting layers are neither figure nor ground, or can be both figure and ground while always being of the surface.
Who are some artists whose work has influenced you?
My work has been consistently abstract: the expressive elements evolving into minimalist, constructivist influences.
From Constructivism, De Stijl, Modernism, my paintings build on that strong influence and historical development. From Malevich, Mondrian, to the present, there are clear connections.
Malevich, Mondrian, Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, Ad Rhinehardt, Morris Louis, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly, Matisse, Andy Warhol, Vuillard, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Tiepolo, Patrick Caulfield, Bridget Riley: one way or another, those are some of the artists influences, but there are many more undoubtedly. Everything I look at. What is in the air now.
The intrinsic structure is always to do with light, color, layering, the implied movement crystallized into very clear and specific transmutations, with a confrontation of sensation.
How does work from one series influence your next series?
Leading up to each work is a slow concentration, both in the thinking, sketching, decision-making, developing time, and in their layering, constructing, intense painting. The apparent simplicity is the result of rigorous focusing to stimulate the senses directly and deeply. Ultimately this creates time and space banking up immense energy.
Yet the work is ongoing. Everything I do leads to infinite possibilities. Working every day, as I do, I am completely immersed in the work, and then by itself the work changes, leading me on to another development. It is work driven, in that the paintings have their own life. Although I am painting and making the works, I am also, in a way, an observer - as much surprised at every turn as anyone else. That is the creative impulse that leads.