The Visual Poem

I find the source and inspiration for my art in the things I see in the real world, the things I see in my imagination, and the things I dream.  I feel and remember them in my body.  Making art is most exciting when I work from three dimensional real life; a model, a still life, a landscape, an interior.  Visual reality doesn’t bind me.  I find the poetic image in my heart, sometimes poignant or impossible, curious or exciting, humorous or tragic.  Frequently, I choose to distort or alter the image I am viewing to emphasize spatial relationships, to increase aesthetic interest or to dramatize emotions.  I also work from photographs, images I find in on the internet, or in books, magazines and newspapers, sometimes images that I have photographed.  Usually I combine images from various sources to create a composition on canvas.  I also work from memory, a more difficult process because my memories are impressions rather than complete pictures.  I usually fail to notice the details.  So when I paint my imagination fills the canvas.   My mind’s eye is the cauldron where I cook the composition of forms and lines, and spice it with light, shadow and color.  Psychologically, my most profound paintings usually originate and develop from responding to paint I’ve smeared randomly on the canvas.  The brush strokes suggest images that reveal themselves to me in fuller and fuller detail as I paint. 

I show a painting like a chef serves up a meal, with the hope that my work will satisfy the guests’ appetites and delight their senses.

AnneKarin Glass

Visual Thinker

Why I paint Umbrellas

Used appropriately, there is everything good and nothing bad about umbrellas.  They protect us from catching cold in the rain and from getting burned by the sun.  They can be useful as well in fending off  biting dogs and muggers.  These things alone make them worthy of consideration.

But they are also profoundly poetic.  Yes, for the protection they offer, they serve a universal human need.  But also their myriad shapes and colors feed the mind with ruminations on nature’s playfulness and wisdom. When new they remind us of segmented fruits and flower petals.  In mass they look like mushrooms racing.   As they age their spines seem like skeletons of primal sea creatures and their colors fade in a fascinating unevenness, countless shades of their original hue.  And their shadows…just think about their shadows, dry and dark and safe.

AnneKarin Glass

Visual Thinker