Debra Vodhanel

Artist Statement

I feel most at home thinking in shapes, textures, and colors: painting seems to unlock a mother tongue, a visual language that more easily accesses my experiences of an emotional, interior life.

I use paint as a metaphor for repairing human interactions that have broken in some way, have gone awry. It seems our precarious, unpredictable, seemingly unpurposeful world is chock full of broken relationships. As I paint, I work toward unwrapping the idea that the world can get better, people can heal and are innately good. I look for this possible reality. I am elated when I find it, hidden under layers of distracting activity and noise. When I find it, I know a painting is finished.

I appreciate the freedom and responsibility that comes with abstract painting, the "what if" possibilities. I reject recognizable imagery in favor of a deeper imagining of what reality may be, what may hover just below our conscious identification. I hope that my work is seen by others as open-ended; it is waiting for each viewer to complete the story with their own observations, their own experiences of the world. The titles that I give each work can act as sea anchors, as a solid place to start the looking and thinking and imagining “what if”.

I paint abstractly, intuitively. All recent experiences of emotive states come into the studio with me. Everything - except color palette, support structure and application tools - is determined by my responses to the experience of the painting process itself. There is no preconceived subject matter, no preconceived composition. I do my best to respond to the materiality of the paint, which quite quickly can become a challenging, chaotic subject. I then go about calming the chaos with the least amount of control I can get away with: making repairs, but not sucking the life out of the work. How can I respect the burgeoning life of the image, whatever it may seem to become? I can pour, scrape, brush, mark, and wipe away bits of it, or all of it: I attempt to give purpose and clarity to the remaining layers of shape, color, and texture that still cling to the surface of the work. Painting is problem solving with a purpose, a purpose that bends toward reparation of my given place in time and space, balancing a resolution that spirals around questions of who we are, what we care about. How can we make the best of it, life? 

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