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Katie Meservy Strader

Artist Statement

Teaching 2D Design at UVU, I ask students to investigate certain design principles by finding them in their daily lives. This has spurred my own interest in being more observant to the world around me. My new series of digital paintings is taken from everyday objects that I’ve photographed, digitized, and composed as paintings. Art reflects the world around us and artists over the years have pushed, abstracted, or distilled their art in further exploration of the possibilities of how to depict that world. Here, I use images such as gutters and driveways, to suggest how nature has pushed, abstracted, and distilled our presence into art. Yet there is a shadow side to this reversal as the images I’m using are the result of chemical reactions from pollution and other harmful, man made encroachments into the world. An oil stain removed from the context of a driveway, is almost indistinguishable from work by artists such as Rothko and Young. The gravity of these digital paintings are in the dichotomy of the beauty of the cropped image vs the repulsion of the subject's reality.

Art In Daily Life 04: Leaking Car, digital painting, 2022

Art In Daily Life 03: Gutter, digital painting, 2022

Credits:

Katie Meservy Strader