Kathy M. Skerritt
Painter

Hire This Artist

ARTIST STATEMENT
Viewing from above the river systems and lakes, mountain ranges and deserts, and all the evolving shapes and patterns of the planetary surface during hundreds of plane flights in the course of a well-traveled youth stimulated my sense of the Earth as a living system. Later studies of human anatomy revealed exciting visual correspondences between river systems and the circulatory system of the human body, forests and the bronchial tree of the lungs, and among planetary topographies and the organ, skeletal, and fluid systems of the body.

Combined with this observing of environmental patterns has been an investigation of what it is that is continuously being revealed from behind or under or within form. To connect the viewer beyond the surface to the substance or process that underlies appearances, to approach a vision of that most fundamental Truth or source condition, is my artistic intention.

The intuition that arises from this consideration is that the underlying substance or process that is the animating force of beings and systems is light as a living substance, light as consciousness itself. The refraction of pure, white source light into the rainbow spectrum of color thus serves as a template of the process by which the apparently disparate parts of the apparently objective world come into material form.

A deliciously physical engagement with paint and surface heats the play of artistic inquiry with outward forms as work emerges. The body responds to the knowledge of its congruence with the patterns of trees and streams and cellular shapes, watery pools, electrical circuitry, the entire abundance of appearances. The hands respond by shaping surfaces that may simultaneously appear biological, geological, anatomical, metallic, and/or fluid. This simultaneity of states is intended to confound or provoke the viewer’s mind with an array of possible meanings. On occasion, the implication of there being no single point-of-view that conveys the truth of what appears to be the object of the painting while, paradoxically, establishing the viewer in direct relationship with the image in its apparent “thingness”, may result in an intuition of a meta-pattern within which both viewer and art image or object arise. The tension between meaning and not-knowing, between “thingness” and the viewer as apparently separate from what appears to be the object of the painting, is a root consideration of my work, whether purely abstract or tending more to the representational.

The aesthetic principle that provokes my artistic inquiry is “prior unity”, a term given by the master artist Adi Da. Prior unity has been described as “…the inherent, or a priori, unity of existence

Featured Work

Do you like her work?
Hire her for your project.

Hire This Artist