photo: CANDRA GEORGE mycreativereality.com
Vibrations of Color Cover artist Allison Stewart
by Anne Honeywell
18
Inside New Orleans
ALLISON STEWART HATES TO SIT AROUND and watch paint dry. “I work on two paintings at a time so I can continuously paint. I move from one to the other,” says the New Orleans artist. “It takes me about three or four weeks to finish them, but I am not waiting for the paint to dry!” When you enter Stewart’s studio, you are immediately taken aback by the scale, beauty and color of her work. And by her genuine smile and humbleness as she greets you, surrounded by her masterpieces which have yet to make it to their final destination. When asked how all this beauty and color gets onto the canvas, Stewart explains it is a bit of a process—first and foremost, a thinking process. “Fragility, beauty, loss and vulnerability—those are the things I think about,” she says. “Living in the region of the United States that we do, there is a delicate balance between land and water that is being altered; we are losing so much through coastal erosion. I go out into the swamps and take lots
of photographs. But I don’t want to paint my observations, I want to paint my feelings about those observations. How I feel is my inspiration.” Stewart was trained as a biologist, and she is motivated by the cycle of organic life in the process of living and dying. “The incredible urge to survive, the change of seasons. It is about the way I feel and more about making the mark on the canvas than representing any particular season.” Somewhere between realism and abstraction, her paintings become visual diaries upon which Stewart records her responses to the threatened landscape. Referring to a group of drawings, Stewart says, “I was very affected by the BP oil spill, and this is how I felt. The rest of the world noticed, but they went on with their lives, and here we are. It is our gulf, our seafood and our wildlife. I never really did anything with these, but I had to get it out of me.” When Stewart starts in on a painting, she has no particular color palette in mind; it is a buildingup process. “No colors come out of a tube. They are all mixed and layered and then scratched into,” she explains. “It is all about puddling, pooling and >>