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HARMONY ARTS
statement

E.M. McFarland

ARTISTS STATEMENT

        I remember a lot about being a kid, especially the  "hallucinations" or "hauntings" as I thought they were. They were images that appeared out of the dark, mostly at inopportune times, like when trying to sleep. Movie screens underneath my eyelids with reels of film that never ran out. Vivid, colorful dreams with both beautiful and dark scenery that floated in and out of my consciousness whether I wanted it to or not. How did I deal with that? Exploit it and learn how to put it on paper. My artistic life since day one has been the pursuit of the technical skills to translate the things I see in my minds eye onto a page or canvas so maybe someday... someone will recognize it and fill me in on why it is there, or who it is.

 

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    I have never found solace in a class on how to paint pretty watercolors, or how to paint still lives, or beach scenes to sell to the masses of tourists on the coast. As of yet, I have never encountered a class entitled "How to translate your warped brain into art" Mostly, it just "happens" to the artists that suffer with this gift, and they either move with it, or against it. I have chosen to move with it.

I could stare at a pile of wood for hours, or a pattern on the wallpaper of my youth with repetitive patterns and swirling colors.... and out pops life. Faces, animals, scenes, ideas, different patterns, ruthless torturers and guardian angels that follow me with the everyday encounters of color and light. Faces of unknown folks will watch me, guide me, and tease me with their eyes made out of footprints in a plain rug, or a funny shaped man made out of the sock I dropped on the bathroom floor.

All the images I create come from an ethereal place that is yet unnamed to me, a place well hidden in the back of consciousness that can barely be tapped, and can sometimes be painful and exhausting to explore, but also rewarding and satisfying. The foundation of where our very life comes from, or just a jumble of the accumulation of experience and images I have encountered since the day of my birth. Life can not exist without creation. The age old question whether life imitates art or art imitates life...I believe they go hand in hand, one can not exist without the other. Life can not exist without creation, so I create.

          Erin Merideth McFarland

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