What’s Going On | BESS CUTLER

Conflict between vulnerability and aggression drives my work. Scarred by its own history, the painting’s surface carries the wounds of subliminal seduction, psychological exhumation and personal exposure. Starting with photographs of the model enlarged and printed by a blueprint engineering press, I aim to construct a loose, visually dynamic complex of raw energy and form that downplays illusion in favor of physicality and the realness of the materials as they are.

While concerned with issues of compositional structure and the push-pull of forces and shifting shapes, I’m equally interested in unfiltered psychological conditions. Translucent underlayers of paint and charcoal reveal the underlying struggle, activating and contradicting the superimposed images, their history enriching and informing the present while commenting on the passage of time and the nature of art making.

I want to make these shifts obvious to the viewer as I celebrate the aggressive playfulness of the drawn line and the richness of material and color. I seek the perhaps impossible balance of intuitive mark-making and seemingly incompatible forces of formal control and constraint as a mirror of shared exposure and flawed human beauty.