Kate Marsh
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My paintings reflect my fascination with perceived visual information and its relationship with inherent meaning or truth in the object being viewed. How much can one perceive about a person from a portrait, for example? Given that it only communicates visual information. So much of our everyday experience as social creatures involves visual categorization of people, places, and things, what are we missing along the way? Through various series of paintings over the last few years I have explored these questions with different approaches.
My process is to find a question I would like to investigate through painting and sketch out a composition that addresses my inquiry. I take photographs and purchase licenses for stock photography to construct compilations on my computer that fill out my initial sketch. From there, I paint with oils on archival multimedia board, building up layers from quite thin oil paint backgrounds to thicker and thicker layers of paint and more vibrant color. My style is realistic enough to sometimes be confused with photography from afar, but up close the viewer is rewarded with painterly textures and brushstrokes revealing the process by which the realism was achieved.
