I’ve always been interested in architecture, human scale and visual
ambiguities. I’m intrigued by the metaphors possible between the
physical and the mental landscape, the latter being not any less real
than the material world, just invisible. My art has evolved out of
minimalism, but I was never interested in formalism. Simple images have
a great power to convey complicated concepts, so the minimalist approach
seemed to me the most effective tool I could use as I tried to express
visually this invisible state of mind.
I still use reductive imagery, but recently I’ve introduced landscape
and natural form into my work. I love photography and spend time both
looking at the photographs of others and taking many photographs myself.
Perhaps it’s because of photography that there’s a bit of realism
creeping into my abstract paintings, but I try to hide this realism as
if it were a secret. Through the use of architectural references and
sometimes even a traditional horizon line, I’m able to explore the
tension between opposites. I try to find a point where the ambiguity
between the ideas of close and distant, inside and out, measurable and
infinite, the personal and the collective, even between inviting and
menacing are in a delicate balance.
I play with layers of paint. Each layer is painted and wiped away
leaving traces of the image I’m trying to release. These layers build up
by using both a control of the medium and an allowance for the
accidental. The finished painting is a culmination of this process,
showing the shifts of the image as it worked itself out onto the canvas.
The surface of the painting is as important to me as the imagery and I
try to work with these two aspects of painting, the physical object and
the metaphorical content, in every work.
"My painting is a conversation between the current work and the previous
canvas. In a way, my work is an ongoing conversation with art history
and everything I’ve ever seen or thought. Each completed work tells me a
little about what the next piece might be and the cycle begins again."
Marilyn Kirsch
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