Danielle Mysliwiec - May 2021

My creative and intellectual interests as an artist center around the durational and tactile possibilities of process-based painting. By extruding thick oil paint in small systematic marks, I slowly build highly textured surfaces that appear to be woven. Daylight is an essential component for viewing the work as the light’s constantly shifting direction, color, and quality activates the textured surfaces and colors of my paintings and brings movement and change into the viewing experience. It is important to me that my paintings resist being comprehended as static images. I want to assert paintings’ ability to offer a moment to moment unfolding. Thinking about painting as a mode of experiencing “slow time” within a digital age of instant images interests me. In this “slow time” of looking, a space of contemplative, free-associative thinking is opened, a kind of visual and intellectual infinity loop between myself and the painting. To me this is analogous to that same space I enter into when in the natural world. It can be walking through geometric patterns in the sand, watching the wavering reflections of light on a wall, seeing mica shimmer. It is in these very spaces both with my work and in nature that my work comes to me in my mind. I often think of how the paintings relate to other natural events that take place incrementally, seemingly imperceptibly, and then all at once – an earthquake, a gradient of color, a wave. I know that Surf Point will give me a unique opportunity to work with light, time, and contemplation and an expansive natural space and studio space that I do not have in my daily life.