Virginia Bryant

The title In the North relates to my first one person exhibit upstate in 2015 at Thomas Aquinas College titled To the North. This exhibit is a summation of and addition to the paintings executed in the last eight years since moving here from the deep south on Easter Sunday in 2015.

My painting process primarily concerns being, movement & color. A mutant sensibility generates it. This process is motivated by the same desires for harmony, wholeness and balance that are integral to musical compositions. These musical structures form the armature & inspirations of my processes. The patterns, rhythms and metaphoric transformations of poetry, Taoist thought and alchemy are also ongoing influences.

Inhabiting places where color and movement are primary aligns with a new language reaching for and in alignment with the essential, the real under girding superficial appearances, in depth relief from the imbalances of what is called "reality" but is actually illusion or samsara.

The wish to make painting more like music is the desire to access states of being beyond words, paradox (which is the realm of the spirit), the absolute.

This is part of why it is a healing modality as well as a refutation of the more imbalanced aspects of "normality" in our days…..

The Cultural Center is located in a modernist building which also contains medieval sculpture. There are numerous places to perch while contemplating the twenty two paintings on view, and my studio is just a few doors away.

I curated In the North with Keynote which was fun and clarifying. These sorts of compilations and going to artist’s studios are the things I miss most about curating.

Narrative evolves from groupings of the paintings. This group has a sadness to it, which seems appropriate.

This evolves through rather than from as music might, making personal constructions of a story or narrative secondary.

Recently experienced Cezanne’s and Pissarro’s correspondence in an enjoyable read by Joachim Pissarro and was struck by their preoccupations with freedom and harmony as themes. This is a part of modernism worth keeping. One of modernism’s defining achievements was the move from dogma and vanity to basic principles and ideals.

I am working on painting, writing & exhibiting with the working title Mutant Fusions which is a new paradigm idea which advocates for change (mutation) and wholeness (fusion) and places a life in art as basic human right with other advocacy actions emphasizing the values of freedom, harmony and the clarity truth brings.

The Chapel & Cultural Center is located at 2125 Burdett Avenue Troy NY 12180 and is open 9 AM to 5 PM M-F & 10AM to 5 PM Saturday