by Esther Pearl Watson
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work has always been about telling stories, transporting the viewer through the patchwork fields and neglected small towns of a quirky Texas childhood. My eccentric father's obsession with building spaceships out of scrap metal in the backyard often led to disastrous results, forcing our family to move again and again, one step ahead of trouble. Setting the field on fire with a careless use of an acetylene torch or finding that our TV had been pawned for a sheet of aluminum was not uncommon.
Like many teen girls I kept a journal, a safe haven to record my thoughts and my concerns, my security blanket for when life became too much. My paintings, filtered through the eyes of someone who is now removed from that chaos, document a time in my life that was often surreal, the truth stranger than fiction. Through humor and faux-naïve charm, my works are part fantasy, part homage to the past, made of mixed materials such as acrylics, graphite, silver leaf, glitter and spray paint. As in dreams, parts of my stories fade and become blurry, shifting and morphing into tangled events. In a way, the works become the truth.
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