Artist Statement
I like soft edges and the act of blending. I’m ruled by color, and in love with fine lines and geometric shapes.
Precise or messy, cognized or spontaneous my work is often a dance between sharp-edged forms and forms half- hidden, the illusion of shapes emerging or shapes disappearing. Sometimes a strong geometric shape or calligraphy floats over the layered colors and happens like a performance.
I bring 25 years of classical Indian dance to my visual arts. The ornate symmetry of Kathak is a fluid language of geometry and flow. I like seeing that flow on a 2D surface.
Wendy grew up in Sacramento and Oakland, California and Reno Nevada. She has lived in Washington, DC, Austin and Bermuda. In 1980, Wendy moved to Fairfield Iowa to be part of the TM community there. Meditating 40 years by now, the meditation practice deepened her desire to express the inner silence and flow through color and movement.
Watercolor, 1973
Field paintings in her teens were reminiscent of the work of Maridee Hays (a painter friend of her brother’s) and were dense pages filled with patterns and opaque shapes.
In high school her art teacher suggested she use watercolors correctly, with big sweeping motions and loose washes. Wendy continued to make tiny shapes covering the page
Her brother Peter is her earliest influence. After he forgave her for spilling black paint on his orange bedroom carpet, they began a long conversation about modern art and through him she discovered Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Monet.
Peter Stegall got his MFA at California State University and is a contemporary of Jim Nutt and other Sacramento artists, and is well-known around the state.
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Fascinated since childhood by Indian arts, Wendy discovered a dance form that spoke to her deeply with its graceful movements, silk costumes and the inherent reverence for Nature in its body culture and music.
One of the unique features of the dance is the staccato stops at the end of fluid movements. (Kathak dances are often done in cyclical phrases that stop on the first beat of the next cycle with a sharp and surprising pose, perhaps after 20 fast spins). Dancers wear 100 brass bells on their ankles to emphasize the footwork.
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A storytelling component channels the ancient stories of India and the narratives of Vedic literature.
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"My paintings feel finished when there’s something about the spatial relationships that makes me fall away from thought. I like to feel that gap I felt in the rhythmic gaps of Kathak or the mesmerizing footwork-a moment of transcendence.”
Colored Pencil "Dances", 2005-2008
In 2009 Wendy returned to her love of collage which was fostered during an art core course at MIU in the 1990s. Working abstractly she incorporated elements of dance and sacred images into the veiled layers of fabric, paint and paper.
Negligee, 2009
The first act of creation every day is the outfit. She loves to take photos in front of textured walls.
Her altered photos often combine artworks, fashion creations and textured alley walls.
2016 studying oil painting with Bill Teeple of ICOn gallery.
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