I began painting my sense of an inner light shortly after my step-grandson, Michael, died at the age of 9.  Standing at his bedside, I watched this child take a breath that was not followed by another.  With that last exhalation, something slipped away, something more than a heartbeat, something more than a lungful of air, and during the weeks, the months that followed Michael's death, I found myself, in essence, trying to paint the light, the spark that ignites each of us.  Stripping away the physical, I began painting landscapes within small pieces of wood, which were inhabited by singular orbs of light, though occasionally more than one inhabitant appeared.  The idea of the body as husk arrived in the work at some point, but the orb continued as an underlying theme.  Orb became object (orb-ject) and then the object became luminescent again.

As one who believes there is no light without dark, I am drawn to creating low-lit spaces.  Light seeps into my images, paintings and photographs, pouring through doorways, falling from the sky, defining, illuminating, showing up indirectly as reflections or as the absence of, as in shadows or silhouettes.

Years later, light still draws my attention.   I find myself once again exploring the variations of light, as seen in this on-going body of work, Emanations, Reflections and Diffusions.

Andréa D. Guerra