Ilana Manolson Untitled

Look down at your feet and you will see power in every neglected corner.

To the casual observer the site of my paintings has no more consequence than an overgrown, muddy beach. Yet day after day, I pilgrimage to this forgotten river’s edge. I sink low away from the horizon line. At this union of water and soil I inspect the most humble, incidental happening and, with a brush, a spatula, and paint, I grab its essence. Experience and intuition guide me into an interior realm of sensuality— distant and distinct from the traditions of paintings I admire. I work in a world of visions for which there are no words: a world “untitled.”

I want to bring you on a journey. Stand in my “ordinary” world— the marshy ground underneath my feet. See the red shoots of a new fiddlehead fern colliding against the acid green spring moss. Hear a quiet pool jousting with a waterfall. Disappear into luscious paint. Tip over into cerulean blue. Drip slowly down the painting’s two-dimensional space. Come to the edge of space— or not. Come to my world of the fixed and the fluid, where an illuminated heaven can fasten upon dark water and then, just as suddenly, collapse into chaos. Enter this painted place that creates its own logic: its order and rhythms; its contradictions and surprises. In these paintings we are part of an endless story of cycles —of seasons where in the comfort of repetition there is always something new.

space. Come to the edge of space— or not. Come to my world of the fixed and the fluid, where an illuminated heaven can fasten upon dark water and then, just as suddenly, collapse into chaos. Enter this painted place that creates its own logic: its order and rhythms; its contradictions and surprises. In these paintings we are part of an endless story of cycles —of seasons where in the comfort of repetition there is always something new.