Artist Statement

I am drawn to the process of discovering something unexpected through the act of painting. My work begins with an engagement with the visual world—its landscapes, patterns, forms, and shifting relationships of color. Rather than working toward a predetermined outcome, I allow the process to unfold through observation, intuition, and an emotional response to what I see.

Landscape has been a central focus of my work, serving not only as a subject in itself but also as a way to explore the inner landscape of memory, feeling, and personal experience. Through drawing, painting, and printmaking, I seek to move beyond a literal representation of the world, allowing color, gesture, and composition to reveal something more personal.

Travel has continually expanded my visual vocabulary and influenced the direction of my work. Encounters with different places, cultures, and environments have introduced new rhythms, forms, and ways of seeing. Whether working with landscapes, the human figure, still life, or imagery drawn from these experiences, I remain interested in the point where observation gives way to interpretation.

For me, making art is a process of transformation. The greatest satisfaction comes when a familiar subject becomes something unexpected—when the act of looking, responding, and making produces a visual experience that could not have been planned in advance.

Bio

Ann's work over this period, from 1975 to present, includes drawings in diverse media and paintings in oils and acrylic, and water colors. Although her major love is landscapes, the human figure and still life are inspirational subjects as well. She has worked in art in her home in Sandwich, MA as well as Provincetown, Santa Fe, New Mexico, San Miguel D'AIIende, Mexico, Italy, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam and any location of inspiration, where she has produced a significant body of work. Her paintings and drawings exhibit a rare vitality and bold strength in drawing and use of color. Not an abstractionist, yet the design, pattern, and her use of media imparts an abstract, virility to her work. Since her senior thesis, "Landscapes of the mind", she continued to pursue interest in external landscapes as a vehicle to express interior landscapes expressed in personal symbols. Recent works include drawings and paintings in graphite, acrylic and oil paintings and monotypes. Ann has continued to purse her work in external landscapes as a vehicle to express interior landscapes, in personal symbols. Her recent focus has been a series of Buddhist monks. A recent trip to Asia has clearly influenced her recent work in monotype as well.

The artist is an alchemist who transmutes the actual into the emotional, and in the process "changes or alters the form, the appearance or the nature to a higher form". The Artist may communicate through any of the senses- sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, or movement; mine is a visual transformation. The fascination and life force in the process is commencing with an unpredetermined goal and being emotionally reactive to the visual environment. The resultant surprise, the sheer joy of creation, is then realized by the alchemy of the aesthetic process; mine can be no greater reality nor satisfaction.
-Ann Solomon