KIM ABRAHAM ARTIST STATEMENT
Any place, even a forgotten, quiet and still place, is alive and constantly changing, moving and breathing as if there is a heartbeat present. My first deep connection to place was the red dirt of my childhood Georgia, where I imagined that the stained earth showed a trace of those that came before me. I now encounter a quiet drama or melancholy in the sky and landscape that reminds me of that red clay, a dream or living mystery.
I have always been immersed in the natural world and while my work has involved traditional landscape themes, my paintings are now exploring a new realm where science, nature, thought and painting collide. I am not trying to render deep space in my work, but use the concept as a beginning.
I think of visionaries like Galileo and Leeuwenhoek, but I also think about concepts of memory, paint, history, color, and about landscape. I appreciate painters like Pollock for the chaos and simple intuition of marks, Corot and Church for their connection to place, Van Eyck for his obsession with surface and object, and Soutine for his pure love of paint.
Normal depth in a landscape simply defines a location, while depth in my new work refers to a measure of time. My lacework of scribed surface marks represents an earthbound time span, while floating particles are illuminations of a distant time warp.
Images of early human markings in stone, microscopic protozoa, and distant galaxies are all recast in a new drama. This drama involves what I sense is another dimension that expands beyond the past and present, as time bends in all directions. I am exploring an alternative universe with new possibilities that explore a world beyond.
I close my eyes tightly and also look skyward on a clear night and the similar vision I see leads me on this exploration.
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