60SIX presents the seventh show of Isabelle Maynard’s paintings in “Refuge.”
A native of Toulouse, France, Maynard spends her time painting in France and also in Napa Valley, where she lives part of the year. She works in a spontaneous style utilizing movement and drawing combined with painted washes of oils on plaster covered canvases. Mostly working large scale, she often starts the drawing with her eyes closed. The paintings embody her emotional states and her experience of the present. The resulting picture reflects the lyrical fusion of her unplanned marks with the serenity of her emotional responses.
In this series the artist reflects on the fluctuations of her painting practice ranging from overflowing creativity to silence, pause and contemplation. When in a paused state she says she has come to understand that stillness is not failure, but her “body’s wisdom” and she waits to be ready again to create. This process of coming back to a place of creativity in times of disquiet, danger or agitation is when art is “refuge.”
She describes this internal territory saying, “ Whether reflecting on the climate crisis, global instability, or personal healing, I return to the same impulse…to create without censorship, without hierarchy of feeling. To let it all be there–messy, layered, and unresolved.”
