Artist talk at MMPA

The Maine Museum of Photographic Arts will host an artist talk from 5 to 8 p.m. July 14 as part of its “Decoding the Domestic” exhibition, which runs through Aug. 5.

Sara Stites and Deb Whitney are two accomplished, innovative and thoughtful artists whose aesthetic are unlike anyone else. They will speak about their work, their inspirations and their passion for art making during this artist talk.

Born in NYC in 1955, I have lived in Texas, Connecticut, the Florida Keys, Miami, and now Maine. I have been working on paper for the last seven years with watercolor, ink, graphite and chalk. I also make sculptures. Starting with small cartoon-like sketches, I work to bring the forms to life — many times using hairy lines and fleshy imagery that some find grotesque. I also combine human and animal forms in my drawings and also in my sculpture.

Mixing representational images with improvisational abstraction is a signature of my recent work. I am not telling one story, precisely, but am describing the feeling of being within a story, one with an undecided outcome and one that is decidedly feminine.

Using visual pastiches and different styles in translucent layers, I build an architecture, an underlying structure, a thickening of experience using color and figuration. This psychologically charged landscape explores the relationship between humans and the world in an open-ended inquiry. Exotic color choices and cartoonish figuration overlay a sense of the comedic.

Eroticism, the subconscious, automatic drawing, clearly refer to surrealism. This is natural as I have always loved de Chirico, even his crazy late works. The heavy black line may come from admiration for Max Beckmann. I relate to the irreverence of Paul McCarthy and caricatures of Barry McGee.  These influences, and others, are filtered through my vantage point of growing up in midcentury America, an observer, anti-hero, survivor.

“I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it — drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.”  — Willem de Kooning 

My work has always had an organic, visceral aspect which I consider to be part of my concern with life issues, like vulnerability, passion, and the uncanny. Much of my work explores the paradoxical; sensitivity to deeply guarded inner stories coexists with a satiric playfulness, exploring the pathetic and comic.

—Sara Stites

The Maine Museum of Photographic Arts is at 15 Middle St., A3, Portland. See www.mainemuseumofphotographicarts.org for more information.