badfishstudios - more information

ARTIST STATEMENT

To make art with all the questions answered deprives the viewer of participating in the joy of discovery.  For me, painting is poetic and can only suggest emotion. The choices I make, between figuration and abstraction and what is implied and what is revealed, are designed to engage the viewer. My work is about transforming the “mistake”.  I re-use old canvases, actively damaging the surfaces in order to affirm a more authentic concept of beauty and to express an evocation of mystery. I strive for emotional honesty in my work and rely on an intuitive sense of color and an immediacy of gesture to achieve it.

SERIES STATEMENT

The Floating City: New Orleans after the Flood   paintings about the longing for home

In 2006, I responded to Hurricane Katrina with my series, After the Flood.  In this new series The Floating City, the impossibility of painting the physical reality of the flood allowed me to focus on the emotional reality. My primary goal is to convey the despair many felt upon seeing the devastation.  

A square with a triangle atop it is one of the first symbols a child draws. These naively rendered houses represent our memory of and longing for home. As the series evolved, these symbols of home became more abstract and totemic while "the flood" itself became a metaphor for the displacement that many of us, living far from our families, experience.  My challenge has been to translate this sense of dislocation from our roots into the language of paint- using texture, composition, and color

.

I have given each painting its own “history” through a distressing process of scrubbing, scraping and wiping away paint to reveal shadows and faded colors. These ghosts of underlying imagery buried below layers of paint, visually communicate abstract concepts of impermanence, time passing, and erosion. 

To reinforce a sense of our smallness against the "bigness of nature" I’ve placed buildings in the lower third of the canvas, as if dwarfed by the sky. In other pieces, multiple horizon lines shift the imagery into the center of the picture plain, as if floating, with houses reflected in the sky above and the water below. This composition is designed to dislocate the viewer from their normal frame of reference.

I use a palette of somber violets, green-grays and translucent layers of milky color to convey the quality of light after a storm, the thick saturated air, and a mood of quiet desolation that I recall growing up along the Connecticut shore.

BIOGRAPHY

Georgianne Fastaia was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1964. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from San Francisco State University in 1988 with a degree in Creative Writing. Self-taught, she began painting in 2001. Her mother, an art teacher is her inspiration. She encouraged her children to follow their passion and to take art seriously.  Georgianne works out of The Art Explosion Studios in San Francisco and supports her latest creation, daughter Sophie, through her work.