ALISON S. MARRA

I’m fascinated by the knowledge that humans have been painting--with different results, but always hands + pigment + surface--for tens of thousands of years, and I like to think that I can tap into some primal, collective, muscle memory when I paint. I begin with a color I want to use, load up a brush with paint, and try to clear my mind so that I can paint the first layer more with the instinctual motion of my arm than with the analytical influence of my head. The rest of my process is about working with what that instinct has given me; I choose more colors, fill the interstitial areas between brushstrokes, sharpen the edges, and deepen the tones. I love the sense of organic movement that is still there in the finished piece, a capture of the way my arm and the paintbrush first moved over the canvas. I like to heighten that feeling of energy by choosing paints with different light reflection qualities so that the painting appears to change as you walk around it. The results of this process are abstract pieces which feel both familiar and distant, like satellite images of landscapes and wind patterns on other planets.