Fillable Printable Basic Artist Statement

Basic Artist Statement

Artist Statement

Hellen Colman

My work is concerned with relationships and interactions. Traditionally, the object is the

subject of still life painting, but my subject is the drama and tension created and carried by

the objects.

I grew up in the land of Borges, Cort´azar and Onetti – the writers of feelings, emotions and

subjective realities – in the south of South America.

My life in Chicago started a struggle for surviving without my beloved words in my native

Spanish. I used to have an inﬁnite amount of words to describe the most subtle nuances

of feelings. I found myself with a very few English words to explain an even broader chord

of feelings. This challenge made me rethink and rediscover my emotions to be able to

communicate them using such a reduced vocabulary.

My paintings reﬂect this struggle.

In my earlier work, arrangements of sophisticated and eclectic found objects ﬁll the pictorial

space in a somehow conventional still life. My new work reduced deliberately the amount

and kind of objects involved; just a few ordinary glass containers, as actors in a stage, express

the nudity of the emotion, bereft of the non-essential dress.

The choice of ordinary shapes – rather than reﬁned and elegant objects – emphasizes the

metaphysical sense that transcends the objects themselves. The glass embodies the sense of

fragility and degrees of transparency in relationships. T he reﬂec tive and prismatic qualities

of the glass make the objects being observed, always changing as changing conditions prevail;

the bottles relate to each other, but also they relate to the changing environment. Sometimes

their shadow s and transparencies modify the austere stage-like space; sometimes the bottles

reﬂect the space and as a result are modiﬁed by it in this fashion.

The intimate scale of my work and softness of the pastel convey an atmosphere of whispering

conversations, an invitation to come in and share secrets.

The body of work represents a formal exploration into the construction of alternative lan-

guages to express the sentiment.