Carrie Bloomston

Artist Statement:
I usually start by screwing something up. The first marks don’t always matter, they’re just there so that I might begin. The first marks change the blankness, remove the preciousness so that I can move in. The rest is a conversation; a combination of intentions and mishaps, discoveries and accidents until I find what I want. It’s as if I don’t make paintings, but rather I find them. They become what they are through a series of exchanges (marks and cancellations) and then I find them there like that - with my conscious self and I think that I can stop. Phillip Guston said he painted because his images didn’t exist in the world and he wanted to see them. I think, in part, I paint worlds because they don’t exist and I want to go to them - each with a logic and a weather, an emotional temperature, a quality of light. Landscapes of the interior. These spaces become for me enduring visual mantras. The landscape is always present in my work - how things grow and live in context of each other, forms in space, living side by side. One mark can become mountain, tree, mist, unknown, figure or ground. The mark is objectified- sometimes alone, sometimes not. In a way, the mark becomes the emptiness - a place where we might put things or qualities, a place where we might go. I don’t want to confine the images, to signify a too exact meaning for the viewer or myself. There should be more work for us when the piece is finished. I want room in the work for mutability, association and play. I try to create enough space so that we can go into the images as though they were air, so that we don’t get hung up on any one thing- so that we don’t get stuck. One of my painting teachers, Holly Hughes, said that we have to paint things with full commitment and integrity to allow the viewer entrance into the work without having to stumble over a lot of technical questions before we can find meaning. I’m after that integrity.