Eromenos
2009, Oil, graphite, rabbit skin glue, gesso of bologna on panel, 4" x 4"

The Deep End
2010, graphite and venetian plaster on panel, 8' x 4'

Alison Hall

Artist Statement
My current work is about the phenomena of the landscape. Landscape forms become symbols of my life events. Observed events, however commonplace they may be, mutate into myth. Rain clouds transform into the hands of gods, a tangle of branches feels like the tumbling body of Icarus falling into the sea. My most recent paintings use the landscape to tell about sudden disruptive events. They are stories about disaster, glorified by my narrative imagination. Storytelling is about sculpting personal landscape and transforming the physical. My paintings are reconstructions, remaking and retelling. I make them with a hope of repairing the human psyche, editing the physical into something more manageable and poetic.

The imagery that I make is a continuing discourse with historical and contemporary figures of painting and drawing. My content, form and process are largely defined by the relationship I have to this history. The personal lineage that I have created with these figures inspire the developing language of my work.

Religious altarpieces, more specifically pradellas, influenced the early constructions and formats of my work. As the shape of my canvases expanded to mimic pradellas, the piecing of monochromes and landscapes intersected to form modern altarpieces. I became more aware of the "objectness" my paintings presented. I became dissatisfied with the lumpy surfaces of my own canvases. I wanted surfaces like Duccio, Cimabue and Giotto (the holy trinity of painting). I felt that the content of an altarpiece had to start at the beginning. I discovered a laborious preparation of rabbit skin glue and gesso of bologna from a painting restorer in a small Umbrian hill town. I prepared panels for months, heating and carefully applying this stinky recipe, then sanding. Through this ancient method of fourteen layers, I felt kinships to meditation and to American minimalist painters and sculptors. The dedication to this preparation reminded me of Brice Marden's encaustic monochromes, Donald Judd and Anne Truitt's clean crafted forms and Agnes Martin as well as Tara Donovan's repetitive nature- they all have qualities of labor and silence.

In terms of form, I am interested in Cezanne-like structure, where looking is pushed to the edge of deception. The intuitive, intense looking in French landscape paintings from the 1800s is a major contribution to my pursuits as a landscape painter. Corot is my mentor. His plein air works predate abstract expressionism- zoom in on Corot's paintings and you will find De Kooning. Corot was aware of the pluralistic nature of mark making. Hans Hofmann's dedication to the picture plane encourages my own investigation of mark entering the closest realm of the viewer-where you can feel the paint on the edge of your eyes. In terms of content, Giorgio Morandi's quietness and humility are sought after. Helen Frankenthaler's continuous glance towards the outside world, and Cy Twombly's gaze into the human psyche: these are the roots of my vision. My mentor of the moment is a contemporary Spanish painter, Antonio Lopez Garcia. He is a drawer that pushes the 2-D picture plane to its farthest interior reaches. He approaches the landscape with patience-he is willing to move with the shadows.

My paintings and their movement from observed realism to remembered abstraction are about the struggle to move with these shadows in landscapes both external and internal. I suppose this stands as a contemporary symbolism. An American abstraction in particular is sourced in a symbolist relationship to the landscape. I have always responded to the landscape, be it Virginia underbrush or orderly Umbrian fields, in an intuitively perhaps spiritual manner and my formal education and travels have reinforced how the landscape has always been the conduit and symbol for humanity's yearning. Every moment in the landscape is auspicious, a metaphor for the human condition. I am an Etruscan.

--Richard Wright, excerpt from the poem Body and Soul

Alison Hall
540.344.4356
alisonchall@mac.com
alisonchall.com