Dance of the Furies, 2012

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Portfolio: Paintings

My sensibilities were hatched in the Northwest where dew, mist, and coastal fog hang like mysterious skeins between you and the world.  Form is not crisp; it’s blotted.  Edges bleed, boundaries blur.  Light is silver and refulgent.  The aesthetic temperament is mercurial.  Urban landscapes are rarified, and nature is sacred.

Now I spend part of the year in my husband’s hometown, Columbus, Georgia.  To move locations from the dewy Northwest to the sunny South comes with a welcomed aperture adjustment as I open to the light.  My studio here is flooded with natural light.  It sits out back in the yard of my husband’s childhood home where we now live in the winters.  There’s a quality here I tap into.  It’s about the light, the color, the people.   Relationship and kindness are valued highest.  At first I thought I’d be a fish out of water here.  I mean, I’m kind of a feisty feminist and very independent.  But I’ve fallen in love with this place that doesn’t care to be rarified, a place that enfolds the Civil War, forgotten industrial landscapes, abandoned mills, ancestral roots, plantations, patriarchy, racial strife, and daddy’s girls, along with a new generation trying to push things forward.   The work I do has to do with movement and rhythms found in classical western music as well as the natural world.  The music is in me, and I paint about it wherever I am.  But the information in Southern light activates my paintings in a way that imbues them with a likened buoyancy, weightlessness, and transparency.

-Betsy Eby