The Art of SPRAWL

paintings by
Ginny Parsons

through April 29, 2005

Joseph P. Bort MetroCenter
third floor
101 Eighth Street, Oakland
(at Oak Street, adjacent to the Lake Merritt BART Station)
510.817.5700

Open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays

Artist’s Statement

I was raised in Chico, amid orchards and farms. The Bay Area has been my home for 20 years, but when I paint a landscape, it’s about density. I long for a less-congested landscape. As I watch developments replace open space, I question how much land will be left.

This work is based on photos I took from the car while stuck in traffic, and is a response to our increasingly auto-dependent patterns and what those transportation choices mean for the Earth. I’m an intuitive painter and I use everything from beeswax to street-crushed metal, roofing tar to Xeroxed photos. Although I use representational shapes to instill order in a canvas, it is the freedom of abstract marks and the random patterns of drips and splatters that infuse the painting with feeling. Order and freedom — it’s always a balance between the two.

Much of the metal used in this collection was found in the Old Beltline Railroad space. There was an underwater excavator, a lively old guy, who had a junkyard that I would explore with my young son. I found old wheelbarrows and rusting metal while my son found lizards and jack rabbits. For me, it was the perfect balance of being both artist and mother, and I’m always searching for balance. When I go on walks with my children, I find cast-offs, what some people call “old junk,” and I cannot resist the urge to transform this detritus of our modern world.

I use many things to bring artwork into being — among them my children, chance, chemistry and the neighbors who babysit. These days, I draw inspiration from my children’s drawings. Now aged four and seven, they are in that moment of childhood before life makes demands, so their drawings are free and uninhibited. However, as a grownup, I invariably include something to worry about: traffic patterns or threatened open space, some sign of future trouble, some unignorable evidence of a world bigger than the happy ending. I’m struggling for hope, which I find in my kids, yet I don’t want to over-simplify it and paint the world into some artificial balance.

— Ginny Parsons