Dennis Bertram

Medium(s): Painting

Summary/Artist Statement:

My oil paintings originated with the concept of the complexity of living that hinders making good decisions. This complexity exists at the individual level and also at the community, organization and higher sociopolitical levels. One never knows quite enough, often what is known is in error or irrelevant, and much is beyond anyone’s control. Moreover, persons and other entities have different agendas that often do not mesh, are deviously hidden or are in direct conflict. These ideas are a fruitful source of inspiration for my paintings.

The paintings’ imagery consists of structures resembling houses, churches, and the like. This imagery serves my ideas well for it is people who build, live and work within such structures, navigate the complexities of living on a daily basis and live with the consequences of decisions they or others make within this complexity.

The structures reside in a psychic space. Most recently, this space is painted blue, signaling resignation or acceptance of life as it is although sometimes with a jarring intensity. In earlier paintings, the space was gold leaf, a symbol of salvation from life’s complexities and associated troubles. There was a period when the space was painted a vibrant black symbolizing nothingness, the absence of salvation.

I have thought of the structures themselves in different ways, as individual persons, peoples, ideas, struggles and even as the alphabet of a language. Just as these exist in multivarious forms, so do the structures in the paintings. They are brought together in compositions that originated in some idea related to but not necessarily slavishly following the complexity concept. For instance, within life’s complexity decisions are often made “on the fly” with inadequate information and poor consequences. From that idea came the series of “flying” paintings where the structures are breaking apart from each other. The idea of life as a journey led to the “skyship” paintings with their bundles of structures clinging together, perhaps for safety and security.

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