Artists' Statement

When I think about my art, my motivations and the necessity I feel to paint, I think that what it all begins with for me is love. When I was an art student in college, during one of our critique sessions the professor said, “When you look at Geralyn’s art, you can see that she loves the paint.” I was struck by that because I had never thought about it before. Maybe it sounds “corny” or “trite”, but honestly, what better motivation is there to make a painting? There is so much to love about the magic of paint. There are eddies of color, textures, both the rapid and slow creation of lines, rhythms and contrasts, varied layers of the surface, splatters and drips. These properties in my paintings speak of what I sense in nature. Marks lovingly made in my paintings become representative of what I love about the Pacific Northwest. The thickness of the foliage that can seemingly grow exponentially over night, the wind blowing through the trees, the sound of the rain or “fog drip” early in the morning, bird calls and the soft “whoosh” of air through their wings, the turbulence of a coastal storm, the panoramic scenery we have on the Oregon Coast or the feeling of tranquility from “forest bathing” that I have on walks with my dog; all of this is represented abstractly through my love of painting.

The result when viewed is that my paintings have an ethereal feel to them that seem somehow tangible, but at the same time elusive. Are we looking out at a landscape of some sort or looking inward at something more akin to a thought or a feeling? Or could it be both? My artwork attempts to be a synthesis of the natural world, the properties of paint through mark making and simply love.