BETWEEN WORLDS

ASTRID PRESTON

Exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery
August 7 – September 11, 2021

Artist Statement

During these last long months of trying to understand and express the feeling of my ungrounded quarantine existence, I have felt a compulsion to paint objects floating in space. These objects have mostly been flowers, which for me symbolize beauty and hope but also the fleetingness and fragility of life.

Spring Asterisms of the Seasons, 2020 oil on canvas, 42 x 42 inches	Summer Asterisms of the Seasons, 2020 oil on canvas, 42 x 42 inches
Fall Asterisms of the Seasons, 2020 oil on canvas, 42 x 42 inches	Winrter Asterisms of the Seasons, 2020 oil on canvas, 42 x 42 inches

My work is always rooted in my experience of the world, with nature as my vocabulary. The paintings are primarily inner landscapes, but they grow out of the act of observing my actual surroundings. They are an exploration and a search—a dialogue between what goes on inside and out. Many of the flowers portrayed here are based on photo- graphs I took while walking every day in my neighborhood and that I then returned to paint for hours in isolation. As it was for so many artists in this disquieting time, work became my total focus, my attempt to find meaning and create structure in a time of chaos.

Dancing Flowering, 2020, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 inches	Blue Flowers, 2020, oil on canvas,32 x 24 inches

As my work progressed, simpler spheres began appearing among the flowers. I think of them as protoplanets among archetypal flowers. They serve to activate the space and increase the gravitational attraction among the elements. At the same time the flowers themselves proliferated. For the painting Spring, I used only my favorite flower, the tree peony, but in a range of real and imagined colors. The painting Summer started with flowers everywhere, and I spent months removing some and adding others to create a more open composition, a space one could enter and inhabit. In contrast to the predominantly floating elements in the other three paintings, Fall introduces some grounding features—the stems which seem to originate outside the picture frame. In Winter, the central space suggests what I envision as two soft lungs, perhaps the fullness of a long, metaphorical breath. The small, square flower paintings are like portraits, a more direct expres- sion of a flower at a given moment.

Together these paintings reflect my emotional journey through these months of time suspended—a sense of being adrift between worlds—a time with its own eloquence and imperatives. 

- Astrid Preston

Dark Petals (top left), Pink & Yellow (top right), Pink Rose (bottom left), Yellow & Blue (bottom right), 2021, oil on canvas, 8 x 8 inches each