FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 16, 2022
Contact: Tamar Russell Brown, Sitka Creations — 978.425.6290
Abstractionist Kellie Weeks Challenges Us
with New Works at Gallery Sitka East
Abstract-Expressionist painters have a unique opportunity that most other artists never seem to be able to pull off. They are constantly calling on us from two different directions — toward the concrete reality we see around us every day and the elusive dream world, both waking and sleeping, that is always fighting for our attention. That dynamic interplay is offered in several new works of painter Kellie Weeks starting June 3 at Gallery Sitka East in Shirley.
“My paintings are intuitively created using color, line, and form,” Kellie explains. She seems to want to perceive more and more about the world around her — including that of which we can often catch only fleeting glimpses. Cynics and materialists generally dismiss such interests as pop philosophy or pseudo-science. But this artist — and perhaps all abstract-expressionists a good deal more than representationally inclined artists — does not make judgments about what we might be able to perceive before we even start looking. Such artists just start looking.
One of Kellie’s primary goals is to achieve what she calls “spiritual illumination.” This phrase implies that light, as it were, can be thrown onto aspects of what we may call (for lack of a better word) spirit. Our emotional and intellectual interests and obsessions may be part of this search for the spiritual, but there are many perceptions that we come across only briefly or indirectly. Our dreams or our intuitions of various kinds might be examples of this. Artists seem to be more sensitive to such perceptions than most people are.
Kellie muses, “As we balance the tightrope between birth and death, we continually readjust what it means to be in the here and now.” Life itself is that tightrope. The metaphor is a very stark one, and obviously somewhat frightening. The present is a hectic mixture of memories, fears, hopes, daydreams (and nightdreams), as well as immediate concerns of the moment. All these influences are continually pushing and shoving artists around to acknowledge many different kinds of perceptions, and of different ways of expressing them in their artwork.
Sometimes we are roughed up by all those thoughts and feelings, and sometimes we are comforted by them. Abstract art is one of the few ways human beings have to express the totality of that mix of perceptions and emotions. In her paintings, Kellie is capturing a moment in that jumble. Abstraction, however, does not try to explain the experience in rational terms. It does not merely “re-present” the objects that the artist looks at, but instead goes straight to the thoughts and feelings aroused by the world around her and expresses them in pure form and color.
Kellie has worked primarily in encaustic over the last ten years or so. But recently she has been working with oils and cold wax, which is new for her and has presented new challenges and new joys. She has confronted other changes during the last year too. Although her basic approach has continued to be abstract, she has been developing more and more in the general area of floral still life.
Yet the representational still life works of this show seem to occupy both worlds. “Reaching,” for example, clearly presents us with a form that can be described in geometrical terms as an upwardly expanding cylinder. Most of us, however, would see it and simply say, “It’s a vase.” We might also regard the field of dark color in the lower part of the picture in geometrical terms — it is a mass of brown and grey aligned horizontally below a background of thrillingly bright colors above. But we’d also be tempted to simply say, “It’s a table.” But where the “flowers” ought to be, contained in that vase, we don’t in fact see flowers. Rather, we see a burst of orange and pink that may as well be described as fire. Yet we cannot be quite so glib about that judgment, because that bright color merges with its own background of yellow and white and a very, very faint blue that doesn’t remind us of fire at all. The cumulative effect of the painting is both to comfort and confuse us. On the one hand, we can say, “This is a picture of a vase set on a table.” But we can also describe it as a battle between dark colors pulling the image down in the lower half of the painting and bright colors blasting it up in the upper half. The painting is itself a sort of competition between representation and abstraction, and it doesn’t really allow us to complacently dismiss it as one artistic approach or the other. It continues to fight its own little battle within itself and keeps pulling us in, involving us and challenging us.
While “Reaching” provides us with the impression of flowers — or rather an imaginative reinterpretation of flowers — “Lil Happening” gives us flowers straight up. While the other picture shows us flowers turned into fire right before our eyes, this painting shows us what we might go so far as to recognize as tulips. The paint is applied liberally to the surface, so that the picture takes on the character of a sculpted relief that we are accustomed to seeing in oils. There is a richness here, a concrete quality that differs greatly from the imaginative, fleeting quality of the flowers turned to fire. These rich, plump petals almost “feel” comforting, like a big meal, while the fiery flowers are full of spice — a sort of assault on the senses. The artist displays a versatility here that seems to come from the very act of confronting very different experiences. The flowers on fire are liable to scare us a little, perhaps primarily because the image itself is fleeting, like an elusive memory or the fragment of a dream only half-remembered. The lush, light-raspberry-colored flowers, by contrast, are no threat at all. They put us at our ease. They make us smile.
This exhibition of new works of Kellie Weeks will open at Gallery Sitka East in Shirley at 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. on Friday, June 3. Art lovers can find more information about Kellie and her work at gallerysitka.com and at sites such as artsy.net and instragram.com, among others.
