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Artist Exhibitions:
Local Color Gallery CURRENT
Januray 2008 Featured New
Artist
Edgehill Studios CURRENT
December 2007
Edgehill Studios, Nashville,
TN December 2006 - February
2007
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Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Reviews:
Coming Soon!
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Statement for Sarahbeth Purcell
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Artist Statement
Sarahbeth Purcell
I have always questioned the dichotomies of the human condition, and especially self destructive tendencies. Through my art I enjoy identifying, dissecting, and exposing these tendencies, as well as displaying the idea of redemption in the beauty of the lesson. The friction between what, on the surface appears innocent, cheerful and simple versus the true meaning and consequences associated makes my work, when successfully carried out, thought provoking and enlightening. It is light in appearance and dark in subject.
My work is shaped by so many influences: being raised in the music business from birth around unsteady, often unsavory, and sometimes tragically self destructive artists, by also being deemed a young success story in my own right, receiving a two book deal with publishing giant Simon and Schuster in my early twenties, and being affected personally by the deaths people very close to me who courted self destruction to their ends, because it seemed the only option to them.
Painting on canvas, and specifically painting flowers often, has been my medium and subject of choice for nearly as long as I have begun a physical version of expressing art. I began painting with oils at the same time I was writing my first published book, LOVE IS THE DRUG, and still alternate between acrylic and oil with all of my paintings to achieve the idea of two very different materials trying to get along and achieve something while fighting for space at the same time.
The recurring subject choice of flowers in my art stems from the knowledge that, for people giving actual flowers to others, they have always been indicative of some form of expression between the two people, literally giving “life”. Flowers can, as a subject of art, creep up on someone as an easily digestible visual that always infers more under the surface.
Poppies seem to represent beauty, because they are by nature quite beautiful, and harmony, because of oft-held idea that white Poppies represent peace, but they also represent danger, because of their seeds that produce Opium and its highly addictive counterparts that always represent self-destruction and often death. And Dandelions have always symbolized for me wishes, hope, and a nearly obsessive and unnatural faith in belief systems and the power of longing.
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