The Roiling Sea
I began this body of work, The Roiling Sea, with the assumption I would be expanding upon the ideas from my last solo exhibition, Journey to the Setting Sun, June 2024. Drawn to the late Romanticist era of artists, in conversation with the artists of the past (J.M.W. Turner, James Abbott MacNeil Whistler), my work was reflective of a sense of impending change on the horizon yet honoring the past.
2026. It is two years later, my relationship with the late Romanticist era artists, (late 19th century to the advent of WWI) has melded with contemporary imagery and experience. My methodical discourse with the past, referencing art history, Turner, Whistler and now Winslow Homer, is now insufficient. I have found that I am suddenly incapable of such emotional distance. My aesthetic methodology and painterly techniques have fallen away and all I can do is frantically paint. It is as if I am scrying from tea leaves, each painting a desperate attempt to make sense of what is happening at this point in time. The familiar, the tropes, populist illustrations are all thrown in with spectacle, the distractions, shock and awe, overwhelm and escapism. Everything that was once familiar now asks, is this an omen? What was once normal, now exists only in manipulated fiction. Unable to paint with contemplative distance, I am untethered, every painting is conjured from what I can’t comprehend. Asking, what is next in this roiling sea of change.
Michelle Muldrow
I began this body of work, The Roiling Sea, with the assumption I would be expanding upon the ideas from my last solo exhibition, Journey to the Setting Sun, June 2024. Drawn to the late Romanticist era of artists, in conversation with the artists of the past (J.M.W. Turner, James Abbott MacNeil Whistler), my work was reflective of a sense of impending change on the horizon yet honoring the past.
2026. It is two years later, my relationship with the late Romanticist era artists, (late 19th century to the advent of WWI) has melded with contemporary imagery and experience. My methodical discourse with the past, referencing art history, Turner, Whistler and now Winslow Homer, is now insufficient. I have found that I am suddenly incapable of such emotional distance. My aesthetic methodology and painterly techniques have fallen away and all I can do is frantically paint. It is as if I am scrying from tea leaves, each painting a desperate attempt to make sense of what is happening at this point in time. The familiar, the tropes, populist illustrations are all thrown in with spectacle, the distractions, shock and awe, overwhelm and escapism. Everything that was once familiar now asks, is this an omen? What was once normal, now exists only in manipulated fiction. Unable to paint with contemplative distance, I am untethered, every painting is conjured from what I can’t comprehend. Asking, what is next in this roiling sea of change.
Michelle Muldrow
