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Artists
Statement
I have spent most of my life
creating images that are responses to the brutality of our time. I am reminded constantly of the world's injustice.
It weighs upon my mind and body. Therefore, I seek the beauty and the
vigor of the paint and the poetry that inspires the act of painting.
Human or animal forms are
usually somewhere in my work. They are the angels and demons of an inner
perception and they re-enact the past as well as presage the future.
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In 1986, I painted seven of
the ten Biblical Plagues. They were painted with tremendous urgency to express
those
ancient afflictions, which I had thought about for years. I saw
these archaic themes as being part of present themes. The plagues brought
down upon the pharaoh and the Egyptian people returned in
various guises. They were the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the threat of nuclear
disaster which could come upon us suddenly without warning.
My early years and an abstract
expressionist are still imprinted in later work. The physicality of the
medium helps create ideas. Forms emerge out of the thickness of the paint.
The painting has its own life, describing a meaning that isn't
specifically planned. Automatic gestures lead to the emotional intensity
of the idea and, strange as it may seem, there are suggestions of comic
relief. As in the Theatre of the Absurd, the tragic
and the comic go hand in hand.
Miriam Beerman
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