Mary Pachikara - Artist’s Statement

It may be the recollections of my home in the rainy coastal region of Southern India that frame my perceptions of the lush effects of water and moisture across surfaces and landscapes. At the same time, much of my early training in meticulous observational drawing came about when I was a young student of botany. My studies demanded the rigorous scrutiny of natural forms at various magnifications and required the illustrated translation of this information. My transition into watercolor painting seems a natural combination of these experiences. I am sure my exposure to two different cultures and climates, my understanding of the various methods of biological illustration, and my art education are all at work, intertwined, when I paint. I tap my botanical acumen by nurturing a large flower garden at home, a place that has provided the source materials for my still life paintings for years. Similarly, figure paintings, comprised largely of immigrant women caught in contemplative poses, have also been a favored subject. But my most recent body of work takes on my adopted home in Southern Illinois as a focus.

In each of these bodies, I use a wet-on-wet technique. It is the element of chance that this process spawns – spontaneous and intuitive – that intrigues me. The resulting aesthetic forces realism and abstraction together in the same picture plane. At places in each painting, the representational details of the subjects – whether flowers, figures, or environmental forms – begin to bleed into pools of color and form. The time frames that this effect suggests, a sort of frozen motion, helps to embody the subjects with suggestive temporal characteristics that go beyond their simple physical selves. Figures in a state of momentary meditation and fresh cut flowers held still in vases are not exactly motionless. The immediacy of watercolor is particularly effective when expressing the landscape as an abstraction that it often is. It allows me to render the transformative conditions of light, color and form that exist especially in the passing magnificence of the Southern Illinois landscape over minutes, days, and seasons.