Inman Perk Coffee

We are so pleased to display the beautiful work by Elizabeth from December 15 – January 31.

Elizabeth Chai Malpass:

Please view Kathryn’s paintings November 1-December 14, 2009.  From the artist:

I am fascinated with people’s choices and the very specific places we end up on the globe. We are all connected and constantly affecting one another. When I was a little girl I imagined that everyone left a trail of highlighted air behind them each with his own specific color.  Looking down at the world it would be possible to see how often paths crossed or near misses happened.

 There is an organic predestination to our lives; you and I changing each other though we’ve never met.  Outside influences contribute to our decisions.  Your driveway connects to my driveway. Think long-term, big picture from space. Think personal, single-family home.  A balance between knowing how tiny you are, and how much you affect.  Who are all these people? Who are you?

       This inspired a series of landscapes dominated by highways with various volumes of traffic.  I went further, painting highways from an aerial view, which became graphic and removed. The integration of portraiture brings intimacy and story to the landscape.  This intimacy is captured best from a live model.  I don’t trust a camera to tell me what is there.  Information traveling a short lively distance will contain mistakes and magic. 

       At the concept’s infancy I was preoccupied and barely paying attention to my own way.  I found myself in situations I would rather run away from.  I have been asleep behind the wheel.  Awake now, I have a strong and growing responsibility to myself and to the work. 

 When I am making this work I feel like I am a conduit of universal love and universal pain.  I feel like I am connecting with something much larger than myself, a vastness, through these people and their gaze.  I guess the feeling comes from working in a state of flow, that mindless place where invention and magic happen.  This magic is where my symbols occur as well.  They spring up from living, exploring, playing, taking notice and from allowing things to unfold as they will with freedom.  The process of living is my inspiration: when my heart is open and directly connected to this vastness. 

By carving into the wood I symbolically carve into the surface of exteriors, into the psyche, into thought, into what is just beneath the surface.  My figures are humans with all of the stories that they have carried around with them of who they are.  Yet, they are universals of all of our unmet needs, our struggles, our longings, our dreams, and our journeys.   With my carving I symbolically create openings for love, for pure unadulterated consciousness to fill and transform.  With my life and my art I hope to create jumping blocks for humans to transform past the suffering and into ways of living that are blissfull and untimately most aligned with love.