ARTIST STATEMENT

I have something like a virtual Rolodex in my mind which contains not names and numbers, but years of study, reading, looking, shadows, dreams, art and world events. Like a receptacle of experiences, my unconscious unfurls into a painting in the same way described by chaos theory, with one small seemingly unrelated movement having an impact on the piece as a whole. 
In this series of paintings called The Hollow Sea, I have brought pieces of writing into my studio, to use as a starting point for exploration:
Ice immobile in a hollow sea melts no more
The first images I painted were abstracted icebergs, which became more bone and flesh, and then underwent further disintegration and disarticulation. As always it's an evolutionary process, where initial mark making creates a conversation that I have with the canvas and the information in my mind. It is not a literal dialogue but more of a visceral or nonlinguistic response to the image as it is being formed. There is a great continuity between my practice as an analyst and the work I do as an artist. Both deal with unconscious influences that affect the way we live and interact. What I attempt to do in this series is to visually fabricate some of those influences.

Julia Schwartz, 2011