Artist
SYDNEY STRAHAN

Artist' Statements!                                                     

Sydney Strahan is a graduate of Texas   Christian   University with a double major in Painting and Printmaking, as well as a life-long explorer of the arts in creativity, movement, and spirituality.

Coinciding with a current movement in art know as Bio-Art; art inspired by biological mechanisms, Sydney's work specifically relates to the exploration of life sciences that examine a human connection to living systems.

Using geological forms such as cross-sections of gemstones, minerals, and earth core samples as visual points of departure, Strahan’s paintings touch a fundamental component of natural history. Mining for a primordial language of shape and movement captured in time, her work reflects natural evolutionary organization where order and chaos echo human symbology.

Much like Byzantine and Early Renaissance painters [et cetera], used etheric icons to encourage a viewer’s unique transcendental experience, Strahan’s work uses elements of the earth as her catalyst. 

The paintings themselves are composed with natural resources blended in varnish mediums. Her use of raw mineral pigments, mica powders and charcoals promote an earthy solidity while the smooth varnished surfaces emulate polished cabochons.

Ms. Strahan appreciates the sentiment of the late twentieth century modern painter Mark Rothko; “Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”

Statement from the Artist':

"Art from the Heart of the Earth"  

I intend my "Art from the Heart of the Earth" provide a sacred vantage point into a mystically revered connection between Human Experience, and our Mother Earth. 

A provocative alchemy occurs in my painting as I translate the earths’ interior shapes and elements into its own image or work of art. Making the work becomes a dance in which the subject and the object take turns leading, where the viewer and the viewed pose to follow. 

For me, the imagery creates a foundation where literal and conceptual expressions may simultaneously overlap seeming; realistic yet abstract, non-representational yet symbolic, contemporary yet ancient, earthy yet eternal.   

As I look upon a room full of my own paintings, it's easy for me to see the reality of the saying "the microcosm reflects the macrocosm". Using the subject matter of the Earths Interior, these paintings sometimes end up feeling like the inside of my body on a cellular or microscopic level, or sometimes feel like I'm peering out into the night sky, or sometimes they even remind me of a landscape in my own mind.   

Carl Jung expresses a kind of amalgamation where symbols generate themselves from the unconscious as a spontaneous expression of some deep inner power of which we are aware but which we cannot fully express with words. He expresses that certain kinds of symbolism constitute a universal language, because the images and their meanings occur in similar forms- and carry similar power – across cultures and centuries, and that the the symbols that make up this language are the natural expressions of inner psychological forces.  

Perhaps these familiar universal symbols and metaphors show up in psychological forces as they relate to their patterning and origins inherent to the earth itself. Many geological and biological cycles, structures, and formations such as fractals, fibranachi spirals, golden ratios, growth cycles, et cetera, continue to produce the shapes and forms used as symbolic iconography. I like to call these images messages from our Mother.  

From the heart of the earth thru the heart of the artist, there is something powerfully engaging and I must say, quite fun here for me!

I hope you too, will enjoy!