Chasing
Waterfalls
A Chat with Mariella Bisson
By
Ross RicePeter
Aaron
...
Shapes, shadows and colors are subtly shifted, bringing more
depth and spirit into the final work, which also employs paint
density and texture, “moving into a geometry, a mood.
What is a metaphor for something greater depicted than what
I saw there? I see this constant flow of water, a beautiful
rock. The water will eventually wear the rock down, but it’s
a thing of beauty during that entire process of half a million
years of dissolution, a sudden shelf, a sudden shift, it’s
a fall. There are all kinds of things you can read into them.”
A
need for more immediate texture took Mariella into a new direction:
collage, in particular the use of paper surfaces. “When
collage got invented, the whole idea was that collage breaks
the picture plane. I tried to make it so collage could describe
Renaissance space . . . a somewhat radical return to a painting
space using a modernist media that was designed to break the
picture. Believe me, it’s an artist in-joke,”
she chuckles.
It
is with this shift she has created a very personal and unique
style, instantly recognizable. Surrounded by bins of a wide
variety of paper textures and earth colors, she shows us two
recent favorites, both with iconic “Catskill shapes.
Those hillsides tumbling down, cliff-face going up. To me,
I look at it, it’s in constant motion. Now some of this
motion is very slow. This tree is falling down very slowly,
just as surely as the rocks are in motion.” The paper
gives a 3-D quality to the work, which, mounted on wood panels,
now employs more variety of colors, especially with oranges
and greens, while maintaining the kinetic verticals and light/shade
contrasts. A specially formulated polyurethane (exclusively
made for her) is applied to the surface, bringing the piece
“out from behind the glass,” as Mariella puts
it. The effect is immediate and tactile...CONTINUE...
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