SARA PITTMAN, SOLO SHOW
OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Sara Pittman is an up-and-coming young American painter, who also happens to live and work in Atlanta. Her atmospheric, non-representational paintings are focused on the exploration of intuition and its relationship to space. The artist’s conscious motivation to sidestep the mundane and escape familiarity is evidenced by her sfumato approach to painting in which she veils her compositions by using translucent layers of paint and by blending edges and softening shapes or marks to create a sense of movement, that is dreamlike and mysterious.
Her paintings, which are often imbued with an emotional aura, are recognizable for their ethereal quality and ability to draw the viewer in, using light and dimension. Shapes are symphonic, yet deliberate, as softened areas of pigment-rich colors collide with chaotic marks in what becomes a harmonious exchange between intention and instinct.
Pittman describes her process as a “Bridge forming from a place of intuition to a moment of clarity,” and sees in it, a visual dialogue that captures the relationship between the human desire for freedom and the need for control. Through this juxtaposition, her work transforms into a call and response exchange and the paintings take on a revelatory aspect that both reveals and hides these personal explorations.
What results is a curious realm of compositional rhythms and brush work, that shift the viewer’s perception, almost like viewing an image that is slightly out of focus. While the paintings themselves may feel fantastical, the overall effect is one of poetry; slides of subtle color punctuated by sudden punches of texture and line create a visual play, further nuanced by poetic titles that bring us gently back to a concrete world that is at once, visually out of the ordinary, and yet, emotionally familiar.
