Stephanie Pierce

Artist Statement

"I think that painters must turn to painting because they are dumb-struck by the tragedy and splendor of life - and to paint is all that is left as a response." - Sean Scully

I live in the world and am compelled to make something from my experience of it. Making painting comes from never being able to know without having the experience of finding out, from having a will to live, a need to hold onto being alive. The need to know is about life, why we live, and death, what death means. Where does what I do come from? It is the gap between birth and death. Painting comes from the urgency of time passing. My paintings are about time. I take from things that seem to go unnoticed...traffic, mundane parking lots, empty rooms. It is the beautiful and ugly natural world around me...duality, multiplicity. The things that come from outside become part of us, they are ingested by us as influence or memory, or resistance to something, or something we feel neutral to, or something we are inspired by. I'm continually trying to see what the world really is or what I really am, looking for something, asking.