303 Daylight
299 Pathway to Sorrento
304 Exploring Rome
Anne B Schwartz
Artist Statement
Approaching art history with a flair for abstract expressivity and a designer's confidence in choreographing fundamentals of color and shape, Schwartz wields a palette knife along with brushes to animate prismatic color stories in thickly
applied oil paint. Her Crystal Auras series are opalescent mixed media paintings created with countless layers of acrylic saturated with mica, interference pigment, and natural minerals that glisten like geodes, and bounce light across
their auric topographies.
Her largest project, Ricordi d'Italia, merges her explorations of the mellifluous properties of color, light, and surface with direct inspiration drawn
from travels to Italy. While these paintings still possess the ethereal presence of Crystal Auras, they demonstrate a more formally definitive, architectural sensibility, being derived from photographic source sketches highlighting geometric details culled from vistas and ruins.
At the same time, operations of memory, deconstruction, and fantasy combine to render them in an abstract language, producing moody palimpsests and evocative scenic impressions.
With Burst, Schwartz's newest collection, we see small, intimate sections of works from Ricordi d'Italia enlarged into wholly new paintings -- gestural compositions whose exotic rhythms
are deeply influenced by her studies of Asian
Sumi-e ink painting, which reveal their inner
lives as
she teases their essences forward from within their faceted depths.