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Featured Artist: Elizabeth S. Gilliam-Hedgepath

9/2/2014

A Home for the Soul

By Elizabeth S. Gilliam-Hedgepath

QuailBellMagazine.com

Drippy Dreamscapes. When I was still in college and during the years shortly after I graduated, my work had all of the venom and statement-making intention I could muster. The paintings were heavy, metallic, intricate, and utilitarian. Then, one day a few years back, a painting emerged out of somewhere deep and lovely in my brain. It was a soft, blue, ethereal light and drippy thing. It begat a subtle transition into a desire for my paintings to impart peace and evoke nostalgia for a world only visited in dreams. I want to create images of things that feel familiar but that have never existed. I have always wanted that, but my work has grown with me and I now like to think of myself as a creator of surreal dreamscapes. I don’t even have a website yet, so it’s hard to think of myself as a real 21st century artist sometimes, but I suppose that is just my way of staying a bit more primitive, or maybe an excuse for being a bit too much inside my own head.

Drippy, Oozy, Suspended Madness. I am crazy about science. If I didn’t have art rolling around in my head all day I like to think that I would have made a fine scientist. Because of this, the natural world and my fascination with the endlessness of space all show themselves in the pictures I create. I love exploring balance, suspension, and contrast within my work, as well as lightness both in terms of weight and illumination. We humans have such heavy, busy, wonderful, tragic, exciting, intricate, dichotomous lives. Everyone needs a happy peaceful place—a home for their soul. Physically I think mine is somewhere in the misty mountains of western North Carolina. Mentally, it is somewhere in the painted light blue, drippy, suspended oozy beautiful madness I have made on canvas.