Artist Statement
“Mr. Green Gold”: Abstract Landscape Paintings by Samantha daSilva
Blank canvas flat on the floor.
We stare at each other. I touch you. Run my hands over the tight stretched cotton. I smile. I kiss you and say thanks.
I squeeze paint onto the canvas and with a roller to move the paint around, blend the colours and create lines and shapes.
Then I create texture in the painting by adding plaster, sawdust, sand, newspaper, ink and rubbing alcohol.
Water is vital to my process. Straight from the tube, acrylic paint is tight and rigid but with water, the paint relaxes, as if taking a long, deep breath, and it appears to move and dance across the canvas.
I tilt the canvas and through my manipulations shapes begin to form. I respond to these shapes intuitively and accept this as the driver behind my creative vision. For this reason, my paintings are rarely considered preconceived.
My paintings contain an energy rarely found in contemporary abstract landscape painting. I am evolving my method of distorting images of Alberta’s prairies with surface interferences and passionate creative intrusions. Abstract painting for me is an experience of addition and subtraction that can articulate balance and resonate harmony in colorfully textured or texturally coloured ways. It offers a way to transform painting into a mode of understanding that can compliment our confidence in knowledge but also challenge it through committed inclusions of sensuality in the art-making process.
My home in Alberta provides views of long, distant horizon lines, flat prairies and rolling foothills, and ever-changing big skies. My new series of paintings, entitled “Mr. Green Gold,” explores falling in love during a golden summer in the prairies. Everything becomes new again and I feel like a small child, excited, nervous, with a spirit full of adventure and a sense of play.
As a new Canadian and revitalized creative person, I use abstract painting to celebrate my overcoming of a history of being a victim, one who feels broken, deficient, and lacking. “Mr. Green Gold” expresses my joy for having arrived and pays tribute to the redemptive power of intuitive and conscious choice making processes.
November 2, 2011
Blank canvas flat on the floor.
We stare at each other. I touch you. Run my hands over the tight stretched cotton. I smile. I kiss you and say thanks.
I squeeze paint onto the canvas and with a roller to move the paint around, blend the colours and create lines and shapes.
Then I create texture in the painting by adding plaster, sawdust, sand, newspaper, ink and rubbing alcohol.
Water is vital to my process. Straight from the tube, acrylic paint is tight and rigid but with water, the paint relaxes, as if taking a long, deep breath, and it appears to move and dance across the canvas.
I tilt the canvas and through my manipulations shapes begin to form. I respond to these shapes intuitively and accept this as the driver behind my creative vision. For this reason, my paintings are rarely considered preconceived.
My paintings contain an energy rarely found in contemporary abstract landscape painting. I am evolving my method of distorting images of Alberta’s prairies with surface interferences and passionate creative intrusions. Abstract painting for me is an experience of addition and subtraction that can articulate balance and resonate harmony in colorfully textured or texturally coloured ways. It offers a way to transform painting into a mode of understanding that can compliment our confidence in knowledge but also challenge it through committed inclusions of sensuality in the art-making process.
My home in Alberta provides views of long, distant horizon lines, flat prairies and rolling foothills, and ever-changing big skies. My new series of paintings, entitled “Mr. Green Gold,” explores falling in love during a golden summer in the prairies. Everything becomes new again and I feel like a small child, excited, nervous, with a spirit full of adventure and a sense of play.
As a new Canadian and revitalized creative person, I use abstract painting to celebrate my overcoming of a history of being a victim, one who feels broken, deficient, and lacking. “Mr. Green Gold” expresses my joy for having arrived and pays tribute to the redemptive power of intuitive and conscious choice making processes.
November 2, 2011
