I am a painter, whose practice crosses disciplines of drawing, printmaking, fiber and sound. My images slip from mountains to breasts, from coming to going, from moon to hole. There is nothing stable about their references; they open and close in the blink of an eye. This reflects an ongoing investigation into things both familiar and unfamiliar. My body, ordinarily a most familiar home, has become strange to me under the structure of chronic pain. These works address the kind of slow, strange change experienced in a space long inhabited: be it a body, a well-known landscape, or the cosmos.
Currently, I am making paintings on silk using dyes. This work explores how the poetics and physics of time function as a physical force by blurring the line between sensation and emotion, body and space, time and object. Descended from one continuously manipulated drawing, the silk paintings employ cleaving imagery, movement without discernible speed, and richly textured surfaces. They evoke the multiplicity, being both generative and degenerative, bodily and alien, sensuous and threatening. Referring to bodies and scapes in a state of change, they open and close, blush and flush, leak and drain, burn and cast light. The transparent nature of silk physically links the paintings to the passage of time, as they shift from opaque to transparent in differing light conditions. Never static, they shudder in the slightest breeze and pulse optically when viewed at varying distances. Not a metaphor or a likeness, they are the thing itself: both temporal and other-worldly, offering an escape from, and explanation for, the nature of time.
Website : https://schmidlena.com/home.html