Joan Weiss: Artist Statement

In my paintings, I am presently working from a sense or visual memory of natural phenomenon. My present series is entitled "Fields of Disturbance", and it is based on spherical forms and space. Embracing Modernist principles that emphasize the primacy of paint and process, I compose images that balance between suggesting recognizable form: land masses, water, rocks, figures, trees, and presenting purely abstract formal gesture. Color is very important to me for its ability to modulate intensity and energetic fields.

Breathless at the sight of beauty my whole life, I’ve rejected the notion that beauty is suspect and elegance is weakness. Beauty is an essential element of my paintings; beauty and ugliness, delicacy and coarseness, grace and clumsiness, share space and create a dynamic interrelationship that comes alive in the act of viewing.

In previous series, I have worked repeatedly from one photograph or sketch, attempting to capture over and over something in that space and time which originally captivated me. My present preoccupations are the concentration of energy in spherical forms, the movement of air, breath, form and color through space, often as that occurs in landscape. When the painting becomes alive and breathing to me, then it is working. It is a mystical process, one which endlessly renews itself.