Author: sterlingsart

abstract painter living in Raleigh, NC- follow my blog to help build my mailing list!

Sue Havens

The Painting Center is pleased to present Sue Havens: Motherboard. This exhibition features large collage relief paintings, works on paper, paper constructions, and ceramic sculpture. Works for Motherboard began by rolling up finished task lists during virtual faculty meetings in the spring of 2020. Other ephemera related to being an artist, mother, and professor was incorporated into the process. The heightened anxiety of the pandemic and the relentless pace of applying for tenure were absorbed into tightly rolled regurgitated balls and began to find their way into paintings. Other material sources include junk mail, supermarket circulars, origami experiments, holiday wrapping paper, fast food bags, report cards, recreation center puzzles, tests, and PTA fliers, finding footing on supports made from Amazon boxes. Paintings on paper also evolved including collaborations with her son.

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Terrell James

Terrell James is an abstract painter who exhibits nationally and internationally. She produces both intimate canvasses and vigorous mural-scale works in oil. James’ works on paper include drawings, etchings, lithographs, monoprints, and monotypes. Her paintings are interpretations of landscapes, internal and external. James has continuously sought unfamiliar environments in which to paint, producing works in place that attend to an area’s specific local light, color, tone, and history, and allowing the disruption and new material to change ongoing work in her home studio in Houston.

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Sabbatical reflections

So to cut to the chase, I didn’t come back from sabbatical with a major change in the direction of my practice. The cube persists. It feels gratifying on one hand to know that I can still find value in mining it and the fact that I am open to change I hope is a good sign that it is a vehicle for developing themes and not an end in itself.

There are some wins that I’ve had this year that this break has given me the time to reflect on, including shaping some goals for future growth of my practice. At the risk of sounding, like I am flip, or even worse, just a hobbyist, my practice hasn’t included a lot of goal setting, and by that I mean intentionality around what I want it to look like at some future time. I have had specific targets, like getting back into teaching, or curating, and the next stage I think involves stacking and staging several, including some that get broken into pieces. And fundamentally, the amount of progress I’ve made in the quality of painting has motivated me to push even harder. I made some pretty good paintings which makes me want to try for great paintings.

I also learned about myself- that I can be alone and be OK with that, that there are strategies for organizing work flow that would unlock the level of productivity necessary to satisfy commercial demand, and that I really struggle to read nonfiction (a good idea can easily catch my attention and turn my thoughts away from the text that follows).

That’s it. Which is also a win- it would have been pretty deflating to find I was so unhappy with my life once I got a break from it that I needed everything to change..