ARTIST’S STATEMENT
“PAINTING IS STRONGER THAN ME, IT MAKES ME DO WHAT IT WANTS” (Pablo
Picasso)
Painting is like dancing with a partner. The painting leads; the painter follows.
It is a joy. It is passionate and sensual, allowing me, as the painter, to spontaneously
express my personal experience of life while keeping me under it’s lead,
it’s demand for form and rhythm and direction.... restraining my passion
and sensuality within the wisdom of design, so that the essential form is not
sloppy or arbitrary.... so that I paint what I see and what I love, all within
the timing.
My work is representational. It is metaphoric. I do not attempt to copy reality,
but rather to ‘recreate’ it. I have no interest in sentiment, politics,
hidden messages, or illustration in my painting. The painting tells me what
to do. It is not the other way around, and it is only about ITSELF. It is only
about painting, nothing more.
I consider myself a classic painter. One who is, as Paul Valery, the French
writer, said “a romantic who has learned his technique.” I think that
the eternal, mysterious ‘delight to the observer’s eye’ which
painting can impart comes from this blend of the romantic and of technique.
Composing is the most important facet of a painting for me, and the final result of a work is due entirely to how it composed itself. Underlying the ‘personal’ subject matter and all the assorted passionate
feelings associated with such in each painting or drawing, it is essential for me that
EVERY part of the work must have a ‘role’ to play, and that one shape
generates the next. The ‘shapes in between’ are treated with the same
attention as the ‘shapes they define’. There is, as a result, an overall
flatness that spreads the picture plane, leaving no trace of an inactive background. There is a quality to the brushstroke that I keep personal, painterly, airy and bright. Color is
intuitive for me...i simply feel it. The result of combining these
elements is a dance that is fresh and surprising and yet magically ‘structured’
and always under the painting’s control...
Among my most immediate influences are Picasso,
Matisse, Cezanne, Dufy, Velasquez, Goya, Titian, the Persians, the Egyptians,
the Caves of Altamira, and I regularly visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I love painting. I love the seductive possibility of creating something that
might be joyful, humorous, timeless and magical...something that surprises me...and
anyone viewing my work...
And it is, as well, my desire to create work that gives evidence to anyone who
sees it, that IT IS POSSIBLE
to transcend the mundane...
to look passionately and with intent focus at the world around us....
to make that “metaphor” that is bigger than life in whatever one’s
occupation......
Painting’s greatest reward for me continues to be the startling discovery
of a constant new sense of things.
JONI SCULLY (2008)