According to artist Linda Stelling, her work is inspired by color, sound, texture, scent — and the “raw, visceral experience of feeling the world deeply through all of my senses.”
Pulsating with color and form, Stelling turns her sensations into what she describes as a visual language, a way to translate her intensity of feeling and explore the inchoate, a world of exploring “the ways we experience and perceive beyond what is immediately visible. It’s about creating a space for viewers to ‘see’ with more than just their eyes, to feel the complexity of existence in a single, suspended moment.”
Indeed, Stelling’s work literally and figuratively flows with meaning, as she creates a dialog with the natural world. She explains that “My work…is a dialogue mostly about the natural world. I am very close to the earth, the people and the animals that live here.”
While sometimes taking on figurative or impressionistic form, Stelling’s work primarily focuses on the abstract, and the freedom abstraction provides for her. She relates that she is “fascinated by curvilinear forms and how I can use them to evoke a response.”
She also utilizes dream work, touching on dream symbolism in order to “develop a choice for initial creation [and] involve color, imagery, emotional attachments, and abstraction as the projected expression of connecting the inner world to the outer world in the form of a painting or sculpture.”
Connecting inner and outer worlds is the heart of Steling’s work, as she converts a personal dialog with color and shape into meaning through her, and the viewer’s, perception.
“Perception is the subjective roulette wheel and can be altered by position, mood, size, and relationship to social climate, as well as how I was raised,” she says, with her upbringing including early exposure to familial artisans and her mother’s profound love for the garden.
According to Stelling, her favorite medium for painted work is oil, whose qualities she asserts is “the most seductive, and gives me the color I crave.” However, she also loves working in clay, and the tactile nature of doing so.
Shaping multi-layered work in whatever medium she selects, Stelling’s goal is to allow viewers to find their own entry point and response to her images. “I am making beauty for all,” she says, noting that “Many of my paintings and installations are about women’s issues, the environment and our responses to the world.”
For Stelling, regardless of subject, her paintings are both conceived and created as journeys, layered materials that she carefully builds up over time with each element ultimately contributing to a finished piece. Simply put, she explains that “I try to make what I like and what gives me joy,” which she then shares with her viewers.
Having shown both internationally and throughout the U.S., Stelling is especially excited about a recent 20-work purchase by UCLA Stein Eye, and by her inclusion in the “Open Show LA” at LAAA’s Gallery 825 through January 10th. Gallery 825 is located at 825 La Cienega Blvd. in West Hollywood, and is open by appointment.
- Genie Davis; images provided by the artist