Louise Weinberg: Artist's Statement
My work has always been concerned with the issue of containment – the human desire for the safety of enclosure and structure vs. the terror of possible entrapment. Containers can protect or imprison. In this new series - Apparitions - the containers are often buildings and the space is always NYC. Urban images at times appear to emerge from or dissolve into a vaporous background. Apparitions began the year my mother died in NYC.
All of the images are "snippets" of memories of myself growing up in NYC - a landscape etched into my sense of self.
Painting for me is a slow gradual emergence of form into space. Using palette knives, nails, combs, rags, sometimes brushes, I am usually pushing, pulling, digging, scraping - searching for layers underneath as I continue to add more paint on top of layers.
Not unlike the way a person's sense of self asserts itself over the course of a lifetime, these paintings emerge gradually and only after much struggle.