nature/humanity
Carole Pryharska
Human nature is one and the same with the nature of all living things, plant and animal life, the planet itself. In our time, we sometimes forget or lose sight of that connection, allowing mechanistic thinking to dominate our world, while vitalism or the idea of a living world has been relegated to the realm of myth and superstition. So, to place man in nature I select structural forms and figures from the past to dramatize Nature and man in harmony and to celebrate past Art for its embrace of Nature. I celebrate the human figure, I celebrate life….. through surreal and exaggerated narratives I call Fantascapes.
In the Fantascapes tree and leaf-forms meld with sun, sea and sky in a kind of flowing movement or passage of time. Through opaque application of oil color, similar to what is seen in Baroque art, natural forms especially floral and leaf morph into a flow of sea and land shapes abstracted and interchangeable with sun and cloud imagery. Root and branch-like forms may emanate fromr sky or sea interchangeably. My expression of a symbiotic action in which Nature shares or exchanges attributes includes human figures cut or torn from art history sources and collaged into the oil surface. Those “symbioti” speak to that symbiotic relationship between man and nature. Seemingly unrelated objects, sometimes painted, sometimes collaged, are juxtaposed to abstracted shapes, creating a kind of tableau or dramatization of the changeable and imagined interactive aspects of nature.
“In my most recent mixed-media series, “Pixelates” I acknowledge and celebrate the color shapes that inform our tech world to create a “fantascape” in which the color cubes mimic the ubiquitous pixels observed in our internet technology. I connect pixels to the past when minuscule squares of glass were used in the creation of ancient mosaic masterpieces.”
I am a process painter for whom the paint and the images merge as I create the tableaux. My process is a kind of stream-of-consciousness event wherein a scene is played out as pieces of paper and painted shapes are conjoined in a narrative that develops compositionally in an almost unconscious way with all the elements coming together on the paper, panel, or canvas backdrop, like pieces in a puzzle. The collaged images are often the central image for the painted scape. On many of the box-like pieces, I “wrap” the narrative around the edges of the panels in an effort to create a kind of ongoing or endless story, consistent with the mobility of the sea and sky between which my tableau usually unfolds.
Pryharska is fascinated by medieval and Renaissance works and draws inspiration from prominent painters from this era, often offering her own interpretations of religious and iconographic themes that were common during this time.