It’s Day 203 and I was excited to do a piece in tribute to today’s artist.  Please join me in honoring the wonderful Meredith Pardue today.  Her pieces are beautiful and I hope my piece does her artwork justice.  It makes me want to go out and buy some really deep colored inks.  Her short bio and statement are from her website as are the photos and paintings.  Please visit it and take a look at all of her lovely paintings!

Meredith Pardue is an abstract artist with an M.F.A. from Parsons School of Design in New York and a B.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited and collected worldwide and published in Architectural Digest, Dwell, New American Paintings, and Austin Monthly Home.

Her work is included in the corporate collections of J. Crew Corporate Headquarters,

Genstar Capital, The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Oceania Cruise Lines, Scott and White Children’s Hospital, and the Savannah College of Art and Design. She lives and works in Austin, TX.

I combine the random actions of painting with controlled, deliberate mark-making to describe each form in my work, which often appears floral or plantlike in structure. The canvases are composed of organic forms that derive from those found in nature, but ultimately the paintings are a visual record of an unplanned dialogue between myself and a blank canvas.

Together the marks and forms create a visual language that reads as something unique to each viewer. I position these forms against a pale ground that at first glance appears to be an expanse of negative space, but is actually a built-up surface that, upon closer inspection, reveals the history of the layers of paint, which are more elevated from the surface of the canvas than the forms themselves. It is neither the form nor the ground that I explore in my work, but the relationship between these two.

The space is pushed and pulled through the tension of positive and negative spaces and through the dynamic of the compositions, which generally tend to rotate or undulate within the framework of the canvas.

I could say that I intimate a certain relationship between physical and psychological

space in my work, because in a sense that is true. But my approach to making a painting is more comfortable, intuitive, and personal than cerebral.

And the result of this visual investigation – the painting – reflects that process. I am most interested in extracting singular experiences – snapshots – from life’s endless cycles of growth and decay, and in transforming the public, universal worlds of nature and human dynamics into sites of private knowledge.

~

Remember to visit her website!

Doing this piece inspired me to do an even larger piece playing with this style, but also making it my own.  I love the colors and textures in her pieces.  I also want to get some really nice and dark inks to play with as well.  I ended up using watercolors and a thick acrylic paint.  I hope you enjoy my piece today and I will see you tomorrow on Day 203!

Best, Linda