I have something like a virtual rolodex in my mind which contains not names and numbers, but years of study, reading, looking, shadows, dreams, art, and world events. Like a receptacle of experiences, my unconscious unfurls into a painting in the same way described by chaos theory, with one small seemingly unrelated movement having an impact on the piece as a whole.

In this series of paintings called the hollow sea, I brought pieces of writing into my studio, to use as a starting point for exploration:

Ice immobile in a hollow sea melts no more

The first images I painted were abstracted icebergs, which became more bone and flesh, and then underwent further disintegration and disarticulation. As always it’s an evolutionary process, where initial mark making creates a conversation that I have with the canvas and the information in my mind. It’s not a literal dialogue but more of a visceral and nonlinguistic response to the image as it is being formed. There is a great continuity between my practice as an analyst and the work I do as an artist. Both deal with unconscious influences that affect the way we see, live, and interact. What I attempt to do in this series of paintings is visually fabricate some of those influences.

julia schwartz

July 2011
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