ARTIST STATEMENT

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WILLARD LUSTENADER

I’m interested in time and memory relationships in both figurative and still life painting.  Landscape often participates as an element in both. The function of realism as a medium in itself is explored with an interest in how the stillness of nature can create emotional responses within the viewer.  The link between an image and apparent paint application is of great importance as the language of thought transportation is addressed.  My paintings and drawings are quiet envelopes for reflection, not merely arrangements.  A traditional, yet often varied, method of working allows me to use the light of the natural world to seductively explore an individual’s private space. This space becomes quite public at times.

In many of my compositions, bodies, objects and landscapes are combined to form links that allow one to travel through a sequence of relationships without necessarily stopping at any fixed point, but at the same time, hover in areas of reference.  Hopefully, the viewer will discover something fresh with each encounter as they rummage through their own baggage. 

With regard to the “cut-out” still life paintings:  These pictures have developed over the past four years as I combine my interests in early modernist collage and post war abstract color field painting with contemporary representational language.  During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s I made a protracted foray into abstract field painting as a means of exploration.  This freedom of the open dialog and mark making is redressed here in a realist format.  Aside from playing with spatial equations, they reference ideas concerning community and self;  these hermetically composed compositions are neighborhoods both urban and suburban where  “stuff” happens.  My goal is to have two worlds operating simultaneously:  the immediately experienced, and the referential.

03/06