Curriculum Vitae
Artist Statement
In 2003, I began a series of work centering around the notions of appetite and consumption, more specifically the consumption of sexual appetites alongside the draw of this primal, driving force, to the sensual allure of the painting process itself. The series explores desire and tension through figurative abstraction, using oils on large cut and prepared sheets of paper. The oils serve a duplicitous role through suggestively encapsulating the forms within the content of the paintings and the direct application or process of fluids and vehicles to the paper itself. The notion of duplicity can also be linked to the amphibious adaptation of life from water, on the most fundamental level, within the conceptual development of this ongoing series. Consequently, water is erotic. Nature is sacred.
Moreover, I am strongly linked to a key principle of watercolorists which is to allow the white of the ground to generate and exude light from within the work. And yet my work is not of watercolor as my technique is more subtractive than additive, thereby attaining greater versatility with vehicles associated with oils. I have arrived at an application that is very thin with explosive swells of formative space while ever chasing the economy of the stroke. Essentially, a dialogue is initiated with the paper as the work evolves from a collaboration of what I sense and impose, to what I see and adjust. The collection appears simultaneously ethereal and corporeal, larger than life and yet subtle. This blend also gives way, incidentally, to the propulsion of eroticism.
Now, 20 years later, the work continues to evolve as these concepts persist and grow through the cyclical rhythms of experience. I have become quite aware that what I am in pursuit of, is the sublime.
-Kelly Jo Asbury
Moreover, I am strongly linked to a key principle of watercolorists which is to allow the white of the ground to generate and exude light from within the work. And yet my work is not of watercolor as my technique is more subtractive than additive, thereby attaining greater versatility with vehicles associated with oils. I have arrived at an application that is very thin with explosive swells of formative space while ever chasing the economy of the stroke. Essentially, a dialogue is initiated with the paper as the work evolves from a collaboration of what I sense and impose, to what I see and adjust. The collection appears simultaneously ethereal and corporeal, larger than life and yet subtle. This blend also gives way, incidentally, to the propulsion of eroticism.
Now, 20 years later, the work continues to evolve as these concepts persist and grow through the cyclical rhythms of experience. I have become quite aware that what I am in pursuit of, is the sublime.
-Kelly Jo Asbury