Move

Meet the Artists

Anne Marie Stringer ’01

I’m inspired by the juxtaposition between grit and style and the complex beauty of nature. I’m attracted to process. I take all the elements of a moment, select and reframe to capture the emotional truth I see in a subject. I define a small frame, a precious line, a place, a figure, just enough. I trust my design voice. I know what to edit, how to deliver a message and when a composition is complete. I create tokens from inspiring moments, find beauty in the detail and reframe in my image to share with the world.

James Smessaert

Something that has preoccupied me through much of this recent work – is movement: how the world around me moves, how I move through the world, how I’m moved by the world. My mother told me that back when I was in Kindergarten, it took me hours to walk home from school, and we only lived a couple of blocks away. Now a day’s, it seems, I race from one place to the next, when I’m not involved in making art. I’ve thought about how I move through a work of art, or from one work of art to another, and back. How works of art in themselves move, even though they are still.

I love motion pictures, how they carry you along. Each movie has a different cadence, a different flow. My art doesn’t quite work that way. It consists of still pieces that imply movement, a brief or extended movement of the eye across a plane, or a pause. I love the challenge of taking a piece of material and trying to make it do something other then it did when I started with it. Make it move in some way, and if I’m successful, have it move someone who looks at it. Material is something that fascinates me a great deal. When I was first starting out as an artist, Van Gogh was a great inspiration. I remember a segment from one of his letters to his brother Theo, where he talked about how sitting before a blank canvas, the whiteness can be so intimidating. His approach was to attack the canvas with passion and energy – not to be intimidated. I feel like my reaction is different. When I see a blank canvas, I enjoy it as a surface, the texture and the color, whether it’s bright white or cream. I love its freshness, like a brand new pair of shoes, where part of me wants to slip them on and sport them around town, but at the same time preserve them – keep them nice. My reaction to the canvas, or surface in general, is similar. I want to manipulate surface, while at the same time preserve its innate qualities, its freshness. My surface of choice has leaned more in the direction of wood, especially in my choices for this show. Because I’ve worked so much with wood over the years I’ve gained a deeper appreciation for its qualities, its natural color[s], its grain, its limitations. Sometimes it’s more fragile then I expect it to be.  I’ve also been working more with burlap. I think it has a little to do with the fact that it’s a nice companion to wood, but it’s also the way it accepts color. Its texture never quite relinquishes it qualities beneath the color, or at least not easily.

As I reflect on movement and surface, I’ve made a conscious attempt with these materials, with these pieces in this show, to try to create a space that resembles a space I desire – a quiet space – much like the space inside me that exists when I’m working. Maybe, not unlike that space that existed within me back when it took me 2 hours to walk 2 blocks.