Nora van den Berg
The process of my work is both deeply intuitive as well as spiritually driven. While painting, I merely offer my hand and paintbrush, which are then guided by a higher consciousness. I often feel as though the images are given to me. My work voices an intense longing for creative freedom untouched by any rules, beliefs, or traditions of artistic practice. My paintings are not conceptual in the sense that I do not plan a painting out beforehand. Their concept is the act of painting itself. My paintings go through many layers of paint in a loose, gestural manner. I attack the surface with my medium, move paint around, erase it, over-paint it and remain open to valuable accidents and surprises that appear during this process.
For me, painting serves as a metaphor for the stages of transformation. First, an image appears on the surface of the naked canvas. It is recognized and somewhat known, but will vanish and reappear after the painting goes through a deeper experience of the actual act of painting itself. Working primarily on the floor, once I set brush to surface there’s an ongoing dynamic flow and movement that constructs a picture message of lines, shapes and forms. An analogy could be The Alchemist’s story. He goes on a journey to find meaning. At the end of the journey, his life looks very similar to before he started but he has a deeper understanding of his purpose.
Once the image is set, it offers a moment in time in contrast to the constant movement and changes in life. The final image makes possible the impossible: the stoppage of time. There then hangs one instant, a quiet moment caught in the continual evolution of life in this world.