| Emilie Horne at Space |
| Written by Ken Hamel | |
| Monday, 14 July 2008 | |
Emilie Horne: NovelSpace GalleryJuly 18 - August 16, 2008Artist's Reception Friday July 18th 6-9 pmSpace Gallery 765 Santa Fe Drive Denver, CO 80204 720.904.1088 Tue-Sat: Noon - 6:00 PM http://www.spacegallery.org Artist Statement: Painting feels like a visceral conversation. I begin with a mark on board and let the next mark be a response to the first. I know the painting is finished when the paint and I have nothing more to add. There is a type of "click" in my body. The actual physical painting itself is a documentation of that experience - it is like a visual record of a conversation. While I paint, I do so without intent as to content or meaning. I merely let myself use the color, shape, and textures that paint allows, and immerse myself fully into a world that I know will later be revealed. During the process of painting, it is entirely experience without conscious content. It’s only later, when the painting is finished, that I can recognize the significance for me and how the painting might, in fact, relate specifically to content in my own life at the moment. This show is titled Novel and takes the paintings’ titles from one of my favorite books – Carolyn See’s 1991 novel named Making History. This novel is a beautifully unpredictable telling of the experience of being human. In my experience of making art, I find a crazy kind of symmetry between the larger themes of making my life and the denser happening of making paintings. Each of these paintings was, for me, a kind of setting out into the unknown and a commitment to the unpredictable - a faithful type of following. Carolyn See’s novel has this same theme throughout, as does my own life. And, although the paintings do find meaningful content for me as I am coming to the end of painting them, I hope they can each invoke individual responses from individual viewers. I would not want to dictate in any way what a viewer might see in one of the paintings. Even, perhaps, if all they take away is a contentment with the balance between shape and color. I like the space between the specific and the unfamiliar, the intentional and the random. I like abstract paintings that are merely beautiful - which allude a knowing and remain as questions. I dislike didactic art. I like knowing that over time, if someone lives with a painting, the viewer and the painting will have a conversation. It will be specific to them and private. It will have nothing to do with me. Artist Bio: Emilie Mitcham Horne was born in Boulder but spent most of her childhood in rural Kentucky. Even as a child, she knew she wanted to be a painter. She began to paint seriously in 1985 when she attended a summer-long program for highschool students at Parsons School of Design in NYC. She came back to Colorado as a teenager and graduated from Boulder High in 1986. Later, she moved to San Francisco where she graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1998. At the Art Institute, she studied with Pegan Brooke, Pat Klein, Bruce McGaw, Mark van Proyen and Carlos Villa. She was the recipient of the Golden Artists Color Award in painting the year she graduated. |
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