Featured Artist Deb Hall | Artsy Shark

Artist Deb Hall presents a remarkable group of complex layered abstract paintings filled with color and texture. View more of her portfolio on her website.

 

 

In artist forums and receptions, I sometimes introduce myself as an emerging artist, at a mature age. Friends sensitive to our youth-culture bias ask why.

 

 

It’s the most truthful shorthand I have for why I stepped back into my art practice after years of letting it languish.  Aging, no emotional maturing, finally brought me to a place of why create, rather than what to make.

 

 

The old Renaissance maxim, “Every painter paints himself” only holds true if the painter in question welcomes and revels in all the pilgrim parts of both the ego and the soul. As a mature artist, I know myself better. I know aspects of myself like fear of failure and the need for control can keep me from being open, playful and experimental.

 

 

I also know, from experience, that I thrive when I risk failure and stay open to new trials and adventures. In other words, my art practice is about building a fuller, more authentic life.

 

 

In every painting session I am meeting myself — revealing what delights my eye, grabs my attention, begs for exploration. I work abstractly and beyond selecting a particular color palette, I don’t preplan my imagery.

 

 

Staying open to what arrives is my only strategy. Responding intuitively to what next in terms of adding fresh adjacencies of color, pattern, texture and forms is how I build my visual story.

 

 

As a horticulturist, retired landscape designer and geology-loving trekker, I’m truly enamored with exposed earth strata and the geometric adjacencies of multi-hued fields and textured growing fields. As a city dweller, I also find the flat and papered walls of urban streetscapes equally compelling. In all ways, it’s these weathered terrains and my curiosity about what lays beneath and within them that informs my art.

 

 

Like the paths I tread, my art is layered, textured and conveys a sense of history waiting to be discovered. I use multiple passes of paint over collage elements I find or print myself. Selective sanding and glazing add depth and, often, a patina of age. In this manner, I express my deep interest in what time both builds and degrades.

 

Deb Hall invites you to follows her on Instagram and Facebook.

 

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