| REVIEWS |
From: corporate-art-consultant.com
Featured Artist - Jill Stasium
For Jill Stasium, who’s been painting since she can remember, real art
transcends the visual and takes us into spiritual realms. There, artist and
viewer
can resonate to something in the work that literally connects them with
something deep within themselves. This experience is what Jill aspires to
with each
painting she creates.
The primary inspirations for Jill’s paintings are music and the poetry in
music. “How the music is metabolized through my body is how it is recreated in my
paintings,” Jill explains. “In other words, what I am feeling when I am
listening to the music flows from my body and out onto the canvas. It’s a very
organic process.”
Though she paints mostly to the comlplex time signatures of Frank Zappa, the
music of the Velvet Underground, Wayne Kramer, Jazz and Rock and Roll are also
sources for her intuitive paintings and contribute to the vibrancy of her
work. “I have a great desire to understand how to integrate the mathematics of
music with the interior flow of painting,” Jill says. “I became more aware of
this process when, one day while painting irises to Bitch’s Brew by Miles Davis,
I observed a strange syncopation with how the flowers landed on the canvas.”
The irises wouldn’t have been painted the same way had she been listening to
Mozart.
Jill’s use of color defines and illuminates the patterns set up by the music.
These patterns mirror the complexity of the music that Jill feels exists
within all objects, a music which elicits emotions and a rhythm that can be
touched with the mind. Her Post-Impressionist commitment to color and light defines
the world through emotions by using primary, saturated colors, colors that she
both observes and invents. Post Impressionists Van Gogh, Matisse and Klimt
are Jill’s favorites. Her commitment to Expressionism is maintained through her
bold brush strokes and essential gestures. Jill is especially attracted to the
aggressive brush strokes of the German Expressionists and the passionate
turbulence of the Fauves. The San Francisco Bay Area painters Richard Diebenkorn,
Nathan Oliveira and Wayne Theibaud have also impacted her work.
Medieval altar pieces, how they combine flat space and depth to represent
physical and spiritual reality simultaneously, influence Jill’s unique
combination of abstract and representational space. Her paintings are ultimately about
integration, color in the abstract and how everything is connected. In that
way, Jill’s paintings also draw their inspiration from Integral Philosophy and
the Transpersonal Psychology of Ken Wilbur. Joseph Campbell and his great work
The Power of Myth, is another huge influence, as Jill draws on archetypes for
her paintings.
“Creativity is my life and totally dominates every moment,” Stasium explains.
Her earliest memories are of painting on the walls at home. “My version of
cave paintings,” Jill says. The only time she really got into trouble was when
she painted the cat with yellow Latex house paint. All the cat’s hair came off
when her parents washed it.
Being in a child-like or innocent state is important in the process of
painting, Jill believes, but the artist also has to go through things to develop and
also become an informed painter. Pre art school were Jill’s Hippie days.
Inspired by the music of the Grateful Dead, she created colorful, loose water
colors of dancing people. In art school at Montserrat College of Art in
Beverly, Massachusetts, Stasium learned to draw and found she loved avant garde
line drawings. After receiving her BFA, she lived on a farm in Maine and did
abstract paintings of farm animals and serious nudes. Large colorful poster-like
paintings followed, when she moved off the farm and into the city of Belfast,
Maine.
Jill now lives and works in New York City, which she feels is the most
inspiring place she’s ever been. On a typical day, she can be awakened at 10am by
two cats tracking ultramarine blue paint across the bed sheets. The next two
hours are devoted to her other passion, boxing, until a persistent inner voice
insists it’s time to paint. TV on, sound off, music like Zappa or Miles Davis or
some Rock and Roll and it’s time to pick up the brush and start painting.
“Whatever is in my head that morning springs out onto the canvas,” Jill says. She
works with images of objects she’s already observed, but which come through
the way her mind’s eye interprets them. The whole time, Jill is feeling and
drawing energy from the excitement of the city outside her SoHo window.
Jill has had numerous solo and group shows and her work can be seen in
galleries around the country. |
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