Artist Statement
I like soft edges and the act of blending.
A painting is finished when I can't live without it.
Color first, then food and water, then squares, rectangles and flowing lines.
I am interested in transcendence and the physical embodiment of it through honesty, intuition and trust.
I want the artwork to somehow blend the unseen with the sensual and be a meditation on the new and familiar. I think the paintings are uniquely detailed and I want them to captivate up close as well as draw you in. The initial gestures can be very free and set the stage for more deliberate layers and fabric-like visual textures. I need to see something through something else - translucence, mystery and the dance between shapes half-hidden and shapes that are definite. For me, this has been a journey of growing courage, the courage to make a mark, to make a strong shape on top of the color gradations I love, whether in oil or the random drips of ink, followed by small lines to fill in the spaces.
STILL DANCING
I bring 25 years of Classical Indian dance to my visual arts, and I called my first solo show “Geometry and Flow” because my paintings reflect the same dynamic that drew me to Kathak dance. A fluid language of movement and grace, Kathak (North Indian traditional dance) is geometric shapes strung together in intricate patterns of hands and feet, and phrasings with crisp staccato endings.
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.
Abstract, intuitive painting is performance, and it is improvisational. For me it is the same dance between basic forms and the raw edge of discovery: lines that break and reconnect, shapes emerging or disappearing, layers of color, like the shot-silk fabrics of the costume.
MEANING
Meaning, in non-representational painting, is in the impact, not the reference to familiar objects. The impact derives from spatial relationships and from color and from other qualities that keep you captivated because, as in poetry, you don't have to understand, you have to feel and to float in the gap between curiosity and resonance. In mark-making, once there is variety of form, you have the possibility of seeing familiar objects and stories. That is okay with me as long as they don't dominate.
What happens when two colors next to each other make the foreground-background ambiguous? In the gap of not knowing mind can fall away.
TITLES
A good title describes the dynamics of the work, without interfering with the viewer's experience. Titles happen like the paintings themselves.
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.
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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