Whitney Brooks Abbott
Painting is learning. Every new painting is a new way to look at life. It is an adventure, a poem, or a puzzle. I really believe that the challenge which painting brings keeps us alive and curious. It is the closest thing to the sense of discovery and freedom you find as a child exploring a forest. John Muir wrote in a journal in 1913: “I went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, I was really going in.”
Painting is also a celebration of our material world in a spiritual sense. As painters, we study the interaction of sunlight on a material surface, and take this relationship into the personal world of the imagination. We combine the intangible with the tangible elements of paint itself, and honor the physical nature of creativity.
To give to the world by taking from it, is the best way to describe why we make art. Some paintings may be more successful than others. But if, in the process of investigation, we stumble across a new idea, or an old, well used understanding of beauty, the discovery is worth celebrating.