Luanne Rice... artist review

I began laying the artistic foundation for the SARIST concept in my earliest works, however it was not until the REDLAND NIGHT series began to unfold before me that SARISM began to gel. I worked feverishly on that series, finishing nine canvases, but still, the intellectual definition of SARISM did not emerge until I went to Puerto Rico the spring of 2002. It was something about the landscape there. I spent a month recording images and finally reached the conceptual understanding that would shape all my work from that point forward.

Perhaps the best way to trace the method of my thinking is to lift the words right off my journal:

The landscape here has provided me with a lot of inspiration and I’ve recorded a lot of images. The mountains are dramatic, steep, precipitous, and green, and I’ve been just about everywhere now... climbing the 1300 meter highest point, winding up and down the back roads, and driving along the coast. This landscape is pushing me more toward a depiction of it along the compositional aspect of the Redland Night series and its elements of abstraction. It is like a bridge between realism and abstraction. And the sharp peaks and valleys, almost monochromatic in their total greenness exaggerate the swirling, in-motion line of the horizon. Everything about this place is an abstraction to me…. Yet consciously real… a subjective reality?

I’m painting faster now and with less detail. Curving and twisting the horizon, giving a sense of transience to our place in the landscape, and questioning the perceived reality. The more I think about it, the less solid our existence on this earth is and my work is depicting that more and more clearly. It is almost as if this has come out of me onto the canvas by itself and I’m only beginning to make sense of it now. It strikes me as a bit like putting the cart before the horse, but I also like the mysteriousness of the art generating itself, through me.

I think it easy enough for the mind to identify what is "real", but the abstract is a whole other thing. I’ve always been a bit turned off by contemporary abstract art, and dumbfounded by the hilarity of critical descriptions of it. I look at an almost nonsensical splash of paint on a canvas and then read what some art critic says the artist meant by it... Where do they come up with this stuff? It is little more than a Rorschach test…. You know, what do you see in the inkblot? But for me, to link that "vision" to a base of reality enables me to be more suggestive of a concept and I think it is going to be much clearer to the viewer. This trip to Puerto Rico and its ridiculous landscape of needle like mountains, deep valleys and distorted coastline is just what I needed to explore this idea more thoroughly, this "bridge" between realism and abstraction. Now I need to come up with a descriptive "name" for this concept. SARism. Subjective Abstract Realism. Sarealism? Maybe…. Saristic?

I will define my artwork in this period of my evolution as saristic. It is a word I have created as a means to express verbally what I’m doing now and how I’ve come to it.

OK. That was the thinking, here’s the definition:

THE ELEMENTS OF SARISM

Sarism is an acronymic based word joining SUBJECTIVE, ABSTRACT and REALISM together and defines a method and style of artwork. The work that falls under this "categorization" brings these three elements together into a distinct perceptibility. There are many ways to do this, but the key to meaningful abstraction in art is to link the abstraction to elements of perceptible reality, through a recognizable landscape element, a depth perspective, color, that kind of thing. Then the reality becomes subjective, the key element of sarism. All reality is in fact subjective and sarism brings this truth of reality forward from the subconscious to the conscious.