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Residing between “that indefinite space between landscape and organic abstraction,” Allison Stewart’s mixed media paintings are visual diaries upon which the artist records her responses to the landscape. Her paintings reflect the duality of substance and spirit, image and impression, observation and memory. Stewart approaches her work as an exploration, a search for answers that often leads to more questions. The landscapes of Aspen, Colorado and Louisiana inspire the artist. Read the interview between Ann Korologos Gallery and Allison Stewart below.
Allison Stewart: My paintings reside in that indefinite space between landscape and organic abstraction. I find inspiration in the visible world around me as well as in the microscopic world that describes the unseen realm of cells and systems, growth patterns and interconnections.
Each day I execute the moves in the dance of creation. Facing the immensity of a blank canvas, I jot down my feelings and fears in the hope that the painting gods will grace me with inspiration. I build up the surface by making random marks, pours, splashes, erasures and overlays, searching for meaning in my actions. Slowly, the random marks and splotches organize into landscapes of feeling that allow me to reflect on the beauty and fragility of our natural world.
Each day I oscillate between loving and hating my creation. Each day I return to my studio to do it all over again.
Allison Stewart: Nature is such a fascinating, complex, mysterious, maddening and ultimately unknowable process that I have to stop and ask the question, “Why do I paint what I paint?”
My inner landscape is simple. I am on the search for answers. But I always end up with questions: Why do certain environments thrive while others fail? What is needed to maintain an equilibrium between plants and animals? For me, painting is a way of discovering what I need to do in order to feel alive.
Allison Stewart: Certainly, my studio practice of daily painting is an ongoing struggle to create successful work that stands the test of time and documents my time on this earth. But more than that, it is a constant dialogue of problem solving and discovery. What can I do with painting that I cannot express in any other medium? One new idea generates a slew of more ideas, and I must get them down on canvas. I start with words, specifically my French lessons. I’m trying desperately to learn French so I can travel and work abroad, but it is just a dream at this point in life. Painting is my language and with each work, I hope to communicate how I feel about the beauty and fragility of our planet.
Allison Stewart: I love the adventure of starting anew with a blank canvas before me. It’s important to me to start the dialogue by recalling my French studies, so I mess up the canvas by scribbling passages from French poets and authors as a first layer. I often work with the canvas on the ground, circling around it while pouring and spreading the paint with any convenient tool. I build layers of paint until I can see a direction of top and bottom, where shapes converge to make some sort of image.
Allison Stewart: The Canto series is based on the notion that a visual language can transmit echoes and feelings of a particular place. The “Mountain Cantos” reflect my experience of hiking the trails around Aspen, Colorado every summer and seeing the subtle changes in the colors and shapes of the season. Each hike reveals more information about the beauty and vulnerability of the natural world in front of me. It’s the small, overlooked natural processes of growth and regeneration that intrigue me.
Allison Stewart: I want the world to know about the beauty and wonder of the natural world, in whatever state we find it. The ability of nature to replenish itself is a thing of wonder.
