Thought Notes From My Open Side

Love Notes Along The Horizon, mixed media on canvas, 48″ x 60″, 2017                                                                                                                                
Artist Statement: Thought Notes From My Open Side In my recent body of work, Thought Notes From My Open Side, my impression of the Oklahoma landscape is the metaphorical ground I used while painting this series.  It is my desire to share the relationship between the natural world, artist, and viewer through the transformation of materials in a visual poetic resonance.As a multimedia artist, my work involves the continuation of my interest in the origin and transcendence of thought.  I convey thought through asemic writing, a wordless open form of writing allowing the viewer to hover in a state between reflecting on their own interpretation while simultaneously seeing the work.Several of the paintings in this body of work also contain port silt loam, also known as Oklahoma red earth.

Relocating to Tulsa twenty years ago from the Washington D.C. area, the Oklahoma landscape has played a consistent role in my past series of paintings, where my artist eye grasps onto the division between the wide-open sky and ground. The horizon becomes a vertical stroke, a horizontal force pushing through fields of thought daring to take flight.

Where do thoughts go but to build a nest of words somewhere?

Where art has been my public medium, poetry has been my private well where my personal expression in art springs. I am currently working on completing a manuscript of my poetry, My Open Side, written over the past twenty-five years, with plans to publish in 2018. The paintings here are visual notes, where in the process of painting, my thoughts ruminate as I give them a space to exist, sealed in time.

- Michelle Firment Reid