Bio:
Paula Mosman was born in January 1943 and grew up as the oldest of 8 children. Her earliest childhood memories have to do with Art and making Art. She drew from an early age. She drew portraits of her siblings and the animals in their household. Art, whether visual or music, has always been a profound presence in her life.
The artist traveled extensively in her twenties. She hitchhiked through Europe and North Africa in the late1960’s, and then lived and worked in London for several years. The artist reflects that these experiences of places, people, colors, smells, and sounds utterly beyond her previous experience profoundly altered her way of experiencing. This in turn has informed and influenced the ‘what and how’ of her art.
Speaking of her experiencing the making of art, she says:
“Making art, painting, sculpting clay, throwing a pot, creating prints ... this is the vocabulary of my mother tongue. I have come home to this place where I am able to speak this language only recently. I am a woman of seventy-eight years. For over forty years I rarely did any of these things other than rare occasions under the direction of someone else. In my late twenties and early thirties, I experienced violent physical and emotional trauma that was specifically aimed at my making of art. For many years I literally lost my ability to speak (as if mute) this language of my art.”
One notable exception was a period from the spring of 1999 through the fall of 2001, when the artist worked as a mural painter and the assistant to the main Thangka painter and muralist on the murals in the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, at Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. This experience encouraged her to reconnect with her own art.
It was to reconnect with the making of her art, that the artist became a student at The Evergreen State College in 2016. At the age of 78, she has just this June earned her BA with a focus in the visual arts.
Artist Statement:
I am primarily a painter and have been working with gouache and Nupastels on paper canvas and paper. I am drawn to these media for their potential of transparency and fluidity both in the process and the result. Recently I have begun to experiment with those same media on sculpted plaster surfaces and lightly primed canvases. I also work in ceramics, both thrown and sculpted forms, and in various printmaking media.
I am equally interested in the forms and in the space and the shapes of the space in and around the forms and in catching something of this never quite stable quality of how I experience the world. In the process of exploring this relationship between form/bodies and the space they inhabit and are in turn inhabited by, I am also aware of two aspects of how I experience forms. I never see every detail of a thing at one glance. Some details are in sharp focus while others are less clear. At the same time, I never see a thing for more than a moment fixed in the same perspective. Things, bodies, people in my field of vision are always moving and changing. While working on a painting, I am responding to the “feeling” of the image as much as to how it “looks”. This feeling has to do with how it feels in my body.
When I am painting, whether human or abstract forms, I am attempting to understand and describe how I genuinely experience and feel rather than what I think I should experience or feel.
Each work of “art” that I make is my reflection of moments in my personal engagement with the world. They reflect one among infinite possible ways of experiencing and infinite ways of communicating about these experiences.
I am inspired and nurtured by artists from a wide range of styles and media. The one common thread is that each of them in some way invokes or provokes in me a strong physical and/or emotional feeling. William Turner literally knocked me off my feet the first time I saw his work in person. He painted light in a way I aspire to emulate. I am always touched powerfully by, the way, the internal energy, and presence of Henry Moore’s forms project through their surfaces. I am always energized and inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s colors, the powerful intimacy of Egon Schiele, and with Sidney Goodman’s powerful figurative images. Among the currently working artists that nurture and inspire me are the indigenous painter, Gerald Stone; Silversmith and jeweler, Steve Yellowhorse; Philadelphia-based ceramicist, Roberto Lugo; Chicago-based painter, Joyce Polance; and the young Moscow-based painter Costa Gorelov.