Katherine Mann won Second Place in the “Bethesda Painting Awards” Competition and the above photo shows a small portion of her over 30” installation art titled “Filigree”. (in case you have not heard, the Bethesda Painting Awards is a competition that honors painters from Virginia, Maryland and Washington , Dc. It also offers a top prize of $10,000 ).
From the Gazette.com..
“Her work is both two- and three-dimensional, with cut paper sections suspended against a backing painted with acrylic and sumi ink. “Filigree” is especially connotative of landscape, but not in any traditional sense. Mann’s paintings are, as she put it, “fantastic abstract environments,” full of hints of vegetation and other organic forms without specific representation. Her work keeps getting better every time I have seen it in the past year; she is definitely one to watch.”
Katherine Manns artist’s statement is fun to read…Here it is!
“My paintings depict ever-changing fantasy worlds where blood cells, rainforests and coral reefs collide and intertwine. Each piece functions as a man-sized porthole into a landscape alive with minute details, patterns and interlocking systems. This is achieved through the conglomeration of minutia piled and cobbled together to create larger, overarching systems that define the whole painting. I work with ambiguous shapes that could function as elements in radically different environments in the real world—a scabby circular shape could be a marsh object covered with barnacles, a white blood cell, or a cratered moon. The real environments of reefs, outer space and microbiology are smashed, in each painting, into one incongruous whole.
The desire to create epic realms begins in childhood, and I explore those early desires and anxieties by creating intricate fields that I find at once suffocating and fabulous. Racially and geographically incongruous myself, I consider the paintings to be hybrids, speaking a language of dualisms and abstraction to create fields punctuated by moments of absurdity, poetry, mutation, growth and decay. I glory in the sensuous and the rambling, but intersperse any chaos with moments of neurotic control. Like the fantasies and fears of childhood play, my paintings are epic narratives, entire societies of fleshy worms, ink noodles or patterned blobs. But they are also clotted, epileptic.”
Check out her website at Katherine Mann
