Lake Herman Dreamworks -- Theory

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Cory Allen Heidelberger – Artist's Statement

What do we live for, if not to create? In creating a picture, a painter at the very least gives the world something new to look at. If a painting can provide even a few moments of diverting pleasure for its viewers (and that includes the painter, standing rather speckled and surprised at his easel as the final brushstrokes dry), then the painting was worth creating. If we are lucky, each new painting will also create new feelings, new thoughts, new conversations, new understandings, and new questions.

For me, painting is an exercise to draw me outside, away from walls and ceilings. Painting outside allows the grass, the branches and leaves, the waves on the lake, and the rolling clouds above to inform my work with their profusion of forms and colors. I work surrounded by the spontaneity of nature. Seeds grow where they fall; trees stretch and branch skyward in their unpredictable tangle; the light changes with the dance of shadows of trees and clouds in the capricious breeze. The rectangular frames and numerical geometries I construct serve as stages for that natural, organic spontaneity channeled by eye and hand, brush, stir stick, and bucket.

This combination of underlying geometry and unpredictable spontaneity seeks not to represent or solely metaphorize our world, but to expand it. Canvas, boards, and paints may be considered artificial products, but if our bodies and minds arise from nature, then the things we make are parts of nature as well. The mathematical schemes that determine the size of my canvases and grids are as much a natural extension of the world as the root systems that plunge into the earth to anchor the cottonwoods around my workshop. The strands and spatters of paint captured on my panels are as much a part of nature as the tracks of rabbits and deer in the snow. Billions of years of coalescences of cosmic dust motes and energy exchanges have led to this miraculous moment when I paint, when new combinations of color and form flow from my mind and hand. To participate in that eons-old cycle of creation and re-creation fills me with wonder and excitement. I hope the viewers of my work will feel a similar wonder and excitement that will lead them to create and expand their own emotional, intellectual, and physical tracks in the substance of nature.