Artist Statement

I paint because I want to feel something. I imagine this is why any artist paints. To get in touch with the connection between the exterior and the interior. Painting is a way of knowing. It is about observing, remaking the world around us.

I paint what I observe, what I feel, what I imagine, and long for in the natural world. I am looking for connection, mystery, the unbidden. As a child, before I had words to attach to feelings, I discovered I could connect with my deepest longings in the velvety muzzle of a horse, in the dappled light of a backyard forest trail, in the loyal gaze of the family collie. Sometimes it was in the sadness I imagined coming from the wind.

We resonate with what connects us to a part of ourselves. In the faces of other beings, in wilderness, in city parks, along train tracks, we are surrounded by the opportunity for connection. I want to understand more deeply what nature offers us - about connecting, about understanding, about paying attention, about being a part of a greater whole.

Clouds reflecting sun, water reflecting land and light and sky, banks and flows of rivers, the draw of the moon, migratory paths, the watchful stillness of a solitary wild creature, the connection between animal pairs. These are the images and experiences, internal and external, that compel me to paint. With the act of painting comes the opportunity to contemplate the soul of each.

I paint from observation, from photographs, from memory, and from what emerges in the unconscious process of mark and gesture making. There is a lot of adding and removing of paint. Working with transparent layers of color gives depth and richness worthy of my subject matter. The process can take hours or days. Sometimes I will sit with an unfinished painting for a very long time. What emerges in the end is always more than I could have known at the beginning, with the relics of earlier stages of knowing a visible reminder of where I’ve been.

BETHANY ROWLAND - OCTOBER 2013