The Hollow Sea | Paintings

I have something like a virtual rolodex in my mind which contains not names and numbers, but years of study, reading, looking, shadows, dreams, art, and world events. Like a receptacle of experiences, my unconscious unfurls into a painting in the same way described by chaos theory, with one small seemingly unrelated movement having an impact on the piece as a whole.

In this series of paintings called The Hollow Sea, I brought pieces of writing into my studio, to use as a starting point for exploration:

Ice immobile in a hollow sea melts no more

The first images I painted were abstracted icebergs, which became more bone and flesh, and then underwent further disintegration and disarticulation. As always it’s an evolutionary process, where initial mark making creates a conversation that I have with the canvas and the information in my mind. It’s not a literal dialogue but more of a visceral and nonlinguistic response to the image as it is being formed. There is a great continuity between my practice as an analyst and the work I do as an artist. Both deal with unconscious influences that affect the way we see, live, and interact. What I attempt to do in this series of paintings is visually fabricate some of those influences.

The Hollow Sea is currently on exhibit until the 19th of September at Bleicher Gallery La Brea in Los Angeles, CA.

The Gallery: http://www.caporale.omnavon.com/

(click Full Screen for optimal viewing)

This post was written by...

Julia Schwartz – who has written 1 posts on The Dasein Project.

Julia M. Schwartz, M.D. is a training and supervising analyst at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, California where she is in private practice.  She is the co-author with Robert D. Stolorow Ph.D. of a chapter on trauma in Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis (Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 2002) and has given several presentations in the area of arts, film, and creativity.  Her psychoanalytic interest is in the areas of trauma and creativity. In addition, she is an artist whose paintings have been exhibited nationally and are held in many private collections.  Her work has been featured on the Huffington Post, on many book covers, and in several publications. Her most recent exhibition of paintings, The Hollow Sea, was at Bleicher Gallery La Brea in Los Angeles in September 2011.

Contact the author

Visit Website