A golden silkscreen of an owl and a bird are composed over a ground of washes of indigo blue, white, violet and pinks. A floral form created using the photographic cyanotype technique. Robert Indiana's "Love" is depicted in a ghostly image, strategically placed to balance the overall composition. The blue color of the canvas resonates with the hues of cyan and deeper navy blues. New York artist, Peggy Cyphers combines collage, photography and abstract painting techniques to create this immersive and meditative painting, which incorporates forms of flowers, fossils, birds and text.

This painting is from the series: “Heirs to the Sea,” which are paintings that explore evolution, consciousness and the sea. Lexicons of painted characters operate as forces in oceanic dramas. Referential and continuously evolving, the brush marks and bioluminescent hues explore an abstract language of painted and printed imagery inspired by wildlife and the sea, relying on a combination of gesture and layering, texture and patterned forms. Using the UV rays of the sun, paint, sand and silkscreen, the pictures create an aquatic labyrinth of the human mind. The works are fossils of time, appropriating and reinventing images directly from automatic writing, nature, cultural history and etchings by early naturalists. The streaming of consciousness between cultural and geological time is the trace of the hand, leaving evidence of everything it is not, as visible impression of the indeterminacy of space and thought impression. The fluid strokes and pouring with sand and paint have roots in the painting traditions of Eastern and Native American art and Post War Abstraction. The textural qualities of paint and sand embed gesture as a fossil of a geological trace, speaking about the infinite languages of the natural environment.

Courtesy of Front Room Gallery