maryciani.com  maryciani5@gmail.com  979-575-1825 

Artist’s Statement

Deluge Paintings

After the Flood Drawings, I moved onto the Deluge Paintings. I progressed from benign or stormy water to oil and blood, black and red, cause and effect, flowing down vertical 4’ x 3’ paintings. Urgent perspectives form and reform in dreams and float in midspace. Colors are mixed. The paintings grow and change as I go into them.  Each is a collaboration between memory and prayer, body and brush, eye and paint itself.

I paint images that are beautiful as well as frightening, so people will remember them.

This art is still new to me. After working in oils, pastels, oil pastels, Ebony pencil, and printmaking, and recent decades of drawing and digital painting, I now paint with a medium new to me, Golden brand acrylics. I use a new limited palette of mainly translucent pigments: the Red is like painting with lipstick, the Purple makes an oily petroleum black, Titanium White for snow and ice melt, a few other strange colors, and a Blue the color of our blue world under attack. These suit a new subject, Deluge; new size, 4’ x 3’ usually; new vertical format suitable for painting falling water (a format rarely used in the West outside of portraiture, but found, for example, in Chinese Northern Song landscapes ). After years of digital painting with a Wacom, I enjoy again the drip, impasto, and immediacy of paint, and the dance of standing with my whole body in motion.

A new urgency as we reach a tipping point. Our eternal turning seasons of birth, death, and rebirth have morphed into disrupted patterns of heat domes, melting glaciers, rising seas, hurricanes swirling over overheated seas, flood, fire, plague, and extinction.

I am an artist in a long tradition of bearing witness. We are artists and this is what we can do.