Alice Zinnes

Provoked to visual explosions by poems and stories, my paintings contain the spirit of the storyteller in the guise of the abstract adventurer. Not illustrations or literal translations, they are instead transformations from poetry to mysterious abstract landscapes of a dream world inhabited by figure, animal and birdlike images. These paintings suggest that the boundaries between underworld and waking earth are traversable, that terror coexists with joy, and that loss must always yield to renewal. In them, the very sky descends to occupy the ground as fog, then rises back to its rightful place; tunnels simultaneously lead downward to a dark center and offer an opening and escape to the bright air above.

Applied with a palette knife, energetic strokes of sensuous color weave through interlocking, and sometimes conflicting forms. Painted textures range from thick impasto to translucent glazes, from areas scratched out to lines fluidly drawn in. For years I painted the landscape of rural Pennsylvania, and that landscape space is in my bones and blood. Now, rather than suggesting the light and space of an actual motif, my landscapes are cast deep in the rich colors of myth and poetry—the language and pictures we create to understand the world at its least understandable.

--ALICE ZINNES 

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