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STEVEN GILBERT
219 Bowery #5
New York, New York 10002

Artist's Statement

“NOT THIS"

These are abstract works on paper inspired by nature. The medium used is soft pastel worked into acrylic paint.

The Paintings go through an intuitive, reductionist process. They may end up concealing as much as they reveal, showing evidence of the evolutionary process here and there along the edges. They have no agenda. What is important is freedom in creation and a process of continual discovery.

They are all about color, how color creates light, suggests atmosphere, implies space, transmits mood, and intense feeling, and invites meditation.

My work is influenced and inspired by impressions of nature.

The work I am doing now is intense and empty. Some call it austere. It starts out generally chaotic and confused and proceeds with furious and desperate energy in an attempt to find coherence, elegance and beauty, by which I mean a true moment that rings out like a single sound held or intoned, a deep sound on the cello for example.

In this attempt everything is destroyed over and over again. Something is achieved. It's too pretty, not this. It's too gestural; I've done it before. Not this. It's too much like a landscape, there's the sky. Not this. The space is too deep, it's too illusionistic, it's too much of a 'picture'. Not this. Or it's too flat. What I want is a presence. Maybe it's too lovely and sensitive. Not this. It's too dull, too dark, too dense, too opaque, not opaque enough, too this, too that. Not this, not this, not this, not this.

Finally everything gets covered over. Maybe I have to start again all over once I have reached zero so to speak, build it up again and destroy it again. This may happen many times before something clicks and magically there is a breathing presence before me that is almost devoid of everything and is full.

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