TAMA GREENBERG's Artist Statement

“My artwork (paintings and monotypes) is composed of 3 elements with varying emphases: texture, color, and image. My basic medium is acrylic paint. Texture comes from the paint application and collage.  Imagery swings from cerebral landscapes to figurative to organic forms to abstraction. I combine predominantly bright colors with contrasting dark or muted tones to achieve a more complex effect, with transparent layers of unmixed paint used to create more intense colors. Color is very personal. I generally use colors that please me.

But I also approach art as a child, playing with color and shapes spontaneously, much like a large doodle, without a specific subject in mind.

Art to me is pure pleasure, the process being as important as the result.”

I paint or draw from the way I perceive composition, texture and color.

My environment, whether on vacation or at home, inspires me to change or alter images on paper or canvas.

I paint watercolors often from my travel photographs or I create acrylic abstracts from my imagined images.

My paintings are dated approximately from 2000-2012. The price range is $300-$2000.

As a figurative painter, my interest is in the representation of human beings with all their troubles and preoccupations. Spiritual, material, social and sexual aspects of our lives are in the mainstream of this troubles. Gods and goddesses of Mythology are not that different but like cartoon characters, they do everything with excess. This is the exaggeration that had inspired many artists and this is why I have so much fun interpreting these epic events crowded by so many weird (but nevertheless so human) creatures.

Forty-five years ago, I came across the Golden Gate Bridge on a Greyhound Bus. I was determined to be a painter and 45 years later, I am still painting. One of my friends asked me if I found inspiration from any of the places that I lived in as a Navy brat. Well, of course I do; all of us are formed by our past. But the inspiration is not necessarily direct. If I have any motto as an artist, it's this verse by T.S. Elliot: We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

My painting is a influenced by the power of nature. I paint first with water colors, then with encaustic paint, layers of hot beeswax, pigment and resin. I coerce it onto paintings as a hot, drippy, excitable mess. It changes quickly from a molten liquid to hard, solid matter. Heat is used throughout the process, especially to fuse layers of wax together. Encaustic painting is an alchemical process of extreme versatility. It is both additive and subtractive. It can be painted, sculpted, or moulded. Between the layers the process is quite unpredictable. 

For more than a decade I have been enthralled by the large cargo ships seen from the window of my studio at Pier 70, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Light and weather transformed these ships into the gorgeous, mysterious protagonists of my paintings, and I contemplated their unknown journeys, and their heavily laden global implications.  Eleven years’ worth of ships have passed by my purview, and I have become familiar with their antics as they traverse the scene, or languish at anchor.

Now, as I paint, I find it may not be necessary to literally describe them.  Perhaps I am painting from the ship’s perspective, diving into the seascape through which they must venture in all weathers. Or perhaps they are still there, just beyond the veil of fog.  I search the light particles for the perfect unattainable spot, a shimmer of yellow-green beckoning me forward, a gentle blue that makes my heart ache, a swoop of turquoise that gives hope.  Traveling with my mind’s eye between sea, sky and shore, I imagine myself completely immersed in the colorscape.

Suzy Barnard, May 2014

I like to create stories and depict the tension between what's happening now and what just happened - or is going to happen. A girl embracing a bear - what is their relationship? Is she in danger. Or brokenhearted? A woman reading a letter - What news does the letter carry? Does it change her life? I'm inspired by San Francisco with its millions of stories, comic-books, Josef Frank textile designs, Mexican wrestlers, doodles, the short stories of Haruki Murakami...and my own daydreams and flights of fancy.