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Christine Schurts -New Work
With puritan pride, American’s deny understanding life by masking emotions and categorizing each others identities. Culturally we are squished into a perfect box, style, or bottle. Sometimes we conform to these ideas ourselves. Advertising companies’ catchy slogans and adulation of celebrities produced personas, which movies, TV, internet and magazines compound our discomfort with our self’s. The reality is that every morning we wake up different from the day before sometimes serene other times rambunctious, and other times depressed. This fluctuation is authentic and we must work with our complexities to grow. Unfortunately, most Americans mask these feelings with personas like the happy cheerleader or drugs of choice, like Prozac and other numbing pills. Being emotional is now only acceptable to watch on TV because we have become a culture of watchers instead of achievers. Watching movies and television people live vicariously through edited characters and we now put actors on pedestals. Popping pills to act out a perfect life we end up in a worse state than when the emotional volcano erupts. Having emotional twists and turns is what makes us human.
Vibrant warm and cool colors interact and symbolize the natural fluctuations of moods. Color is a catalyst that embraces emotional and psychological expression for me. I aim to have the viewer imagine and explore their own ideas drawing on their history and experience. Self-portraits focusing on my body repeat in a series of artworks and sometimes even in particular works. Self-portraits are my method to picture my own emotional and psychological evolutions. They are a process of imagining interpretations of me. I use my body because I feel that I am representative of a larger experience in our society today. One day I feel lazily blue and another glowing golden from within. Internal emotions don’t need to be masked because they will eventually resurface with an onslaught of other suppressed emotions and could cause more traumas. Portraits of women in my life are colorful and abstract to represent the unpretentious divinity of their emotional lives. Layers made of paint, sand, diary pages, decorative papers, and resin work as levels of varied texture and strength and symbolize masks we wear to protect us from revealing our true feelings, which could leave us labeled crazy,
depressed, and or feeling rejected. Strong lines give the figures strength and presence. Intense attention is given to the moment I slap paint on, drips are free to change the painting in hopes of happy accidents. My ambition is to embrace authentic emotions and give life to them through my paintings. |
  
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Established 2003