Karli White

ARTIST STATEMENT

Thesis Title: Transient Permanence

Throughout the years of learning and creating art, I have come to acquire a set of skills that has led me to creating art in the style that I do now. Coming to enjoy and appreciate the making of abstract art is something that I have learned to love while also incorporating art therapy methods into my work. When making art and painting on canvases big and small, I find that I empty my mind of all other worries and just focus on what is in front of me. All of the colors, the tools, the surface in which I’m working on. I become one with the paints, fully submerged in the brilliance of oils. Even the smell has become something that I can’t wait to be surrounded by.

While working with this medium in a small Studio space, creation of art for me becomes this intimate experience. I spend so much time with my paintings. I see them when I wake up in the morning and they are the last thing that I see before I go to bed. I am always looking at them and thinking about what I could have done differently, what I could change, what I could add to them. There is also the thought of never knowing when an abstract is actually finished. I focus a lot on high levels of texture, so the instinct to continue adding to an already overdone surface becomes more appealing as this creation before me becomes almost absurd with the amount of time and paint I have used to work the piece.

Sometimes I look at my work and I think that it is disgusting and strange, but at the same time, I also feel that it is my intention to make it appear that way. I want people to observe and question my methods. I want them to spend time looking at all of the details and all of the different colors and strokes that went into making my paintings.

The concept of quote “Transient Permanence” comes from the idea that art is forever. It is timeless. It stays here on earth even after we are gone. My paintings, all of the art that I create has a permanent place on this earth almost destroyed. No matter what happens to me in this life, I have contributed my art to the people around me and whoever lays eyes on it. You are not really ever dead and gone, if you have contributed to something. Art is subjective and can be anything we wanted to be. Of course the critics out there always have something to say about this art and that art. For the artist themselves, creating an expressive piece of who they are, to be seen in the world outside of one’s mind, is a beautiful thing. It is poetic. No matter how big or small, leaving a piece of yourself on this earth in the form of art, to be bought and sold and passed down from one person to another. Who knows where my paintings will be in ten or twenty years. The feelings experienced while painting them is what I hold on to, as well as the physical pieces as long as I have them.