Inez Storer
Russian Icon, 2012
mixed media with painting on paper
35 x 26 in.
unique

My work usually has an aspect of implied history, both through the use of the figure as well as objects that are a part of my “home” collections. The figures have a tendency to be slightly off balance, or passing from one reality to another. The absurd is of great interest, usually through the use of unconscious motivations. The figures can fill the landscape, either in a psychic way or in ways that are above gravity-pulled orientations. In using an imagined format of the surreal, I am able to work a more unreal world of fantasy. It does always seem to fantasy to me. There is oftentimes an attempt at an unrealized form of danger, close, in fact, to the real world…an emotional, sometimes physical precariousness. It seems to be a way of seeking clarity and identity through a parallel of sense of isolation. After all, I work alone in my studio almost every day.

I usually start my work by marking the surface of the painting, adding more and more, then peeling away the surface to the first marks. It seems a metaphor of one’s own life, as the future becomes enmeshed with the past.

Most of the time I enter my studio with an agenda, but then something happens, and I let the painting take me on its own journey. To be surprised while painting is the real experience, the reason to keep on doing the work. I have objects, bits and pieces, images cut from a myriad of sources and whatever I can collect that inform my work, or sometimes I actually attach materials of some kind to the surface of the painting. It is a way of going shopping every time I am in the studio. And artists love to shop in whatever form that activity can take.

We are all like blotters. I am a blotter, absorbing all the different aspects of what I experience. Painting is evolutionary, and a grand experience.

Inez Storer
Inverness, California