Working outdoors assures me of two things a closed studio inhibits: absolute concentration, and a sense of urgency which causes me to distill the land to irreducible forms. Accessing my abstract and mental furniture is accomplished when I stalk a painting subject, not for its beauty or pictorial qualities, but for resonance with an internal subject which hankers for expression in paint, but eludes me in words. Because I began as an abstract painter I have always been attentive to the ideas served up by process. I think of my plein-air high-tension search for equivalents beyond the merely allusive, as if abstractions were masquerading as landscape, twice, sometimes thrice removed from the natural forms which provoked them.

As Goethe wrote "only the mediocre talent is always the captive of its time and must get its nourishment from the elements that time contains." It is through tradition that the artist has his or her most palpable link with something that transcends the contingencies of the moment. I do not believe attitude is everything. I believe content does matter, not pesky politics, but serious artistic ambition.

In monotype my abstract sense masquerades as landscape or still life. The groping with the brayers and scrapers, the loaded brushes, and even my fingers renders facility or virtuosity useless. Thus hobbled and awkward I must search for the irreducible, expressive form by distilling painted ideas to the absolute minimum economy of plane or line or gestural brush track, which in most cases will be pushed, blended, bled, and reversed in the printing process, and thereby many times removed or abstracted from the subject.

The search for virgin territory in my personal vision has brought me to the risk-ridden medium of monotype, much like the whole abstracting movement of this century has sought equivalents for reality beyond 19th century description. Similarly I believe the dynamics of accident, automatism, and urgency of the medium directly serve 20th century faith in the major role of the unconscious in creativity, and the need of the self to move personal experience into an expressive sign, absent of the autobiographical and transitory, and in touch with the universal.

Biography:

Joellyn Duesberry obtained traditional training from Smith College where she earned a double major in Painting and Art History. She received an M.A. in Art History at the New York University of Fine Arts on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1967. She began exhibiting in New York in 1979, receiving seven solo exhibitions first at Tatischeff then at James Graham and Sons, where she is currently represented. She is also affiliated with Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe and Robischon Gallery in Denver.

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