markoneff 

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“I began to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don’t look back along time, but down through it, like water.” 

                                                                                                     Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

My continuing artistic pursuit is expressing my experiences in nature. I don’t distinguish between inner and outer landscapes: between the environment as the physical world out there, and the mental image of the environment within each of us. It’s the tension, the transition, the exchange, and the resonance between the two modes that energize and define our reality. The space between is where the work operates.

I am influenced by a variety of terrains: vertiginous northern California forests, Utah’s rock striations with their heedless palettes, the celestial cymbals of Hawaiian waterfalls, the boundlessness of the New Mexico desert sky,

and the underworld of the Great Barrier Reef.

In these places, I can swim into a pool where the true movement is not on the glints and sparkles of the surface, but deeper, in the primeval links where nature’s essence swirls and snakes and hints at revealing itself.

My practice begins with an atmospheric space that is both poured and sprayed. Into this vast expanse, I layer a series of organic images, which I have painted onto transparent paper.  This allows a view through the material to the layers below, which have been fused in wax with a propane torch. 

This surface is often scraped away to the layers below, creating waves, rifts, and fissures which convey a sense of the density and complexity of nature as a strata of time, arrested in a state of flux.

By proceeding in orderly layers and then disrupting the surface, the outer world gives way to what is invisible, blurring the boundaries between subject and object, consciousness and matter, the inner psychological world and the vast terrain that surrounds us: an eternal state of potential grace.

                                                          Mary Koneff

        Santa Monica CA