'Improvisation' by Carol Dickerson

A few years ago I began experimenting with large paintings on raw unprimed canvas. The raw canvas sucks up the first layers of paint, muting colors and blending lines. As I build up layers, marks and shapes become more defined and colors more saturated. Each layer is a response to what I see on the canvas; adding more marks, rhythmical patterns, and color shifts until it pulls together. The finished paintings are hung on wooden dowels like tapestries. This collection includes some of those original raw canvas paintings and four new “tapestries,” along with some new paintings on wood panels.

About the Artist:
“Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.” excerpt from Mary Oliver’s poem “Franz Marc’s Blue Horses”
My intention is to create images that draw the viewer into a mysterious but somehow familiar world through the universal language of proportion, balance, and harmony.It begins with despoilment—creating a mess on a pristine surface of canvas, paper, or wood. Random lines in charcoal or drippy paint, automatic writing, textured mediums, stenciled patterns, and splashes of color. Then the process of covering and uncovering, addition and subtraction, over and over again as I seek a resolution of the problems I have created. Pattern, texture, veiled shapes, and colors appear and disappear. My basic question is always “does it please me?” Some combination of color, shapes, lines that I am drawn to—undergirded by knowledge of design principles and color harmony—creates the feeling I seek. Occasionally this resolution happens rather quickly, but more often it takes layers and layers. The trick is recognizing the good things that show up by accident.

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