Colette Sexton - About the Artist

Artist's Statement

October 2006
This current body of work is an extension and further exploration of creating paintings from my immediate surroundings. These paintings aim to convey my fulfillment living in a Historical American small-town. Lambertville, which feels genuinely home to me, is a close community where neighbors gather on sidewalks and porches to catch up in the evening or over morning coffee. This society vastly differs from my previous life experience living in both urban and suburban America. The formative suburban Landscape of my childhood left me feeling a void of stimulation. Conversely, the Delaware river-town of Lambertville appeals to me through a saturated of stimulus both visually and socially. During the April of 2003 show, I exhibited and described a large Painting that overlooked the town of Lambertville. The image was painted from a graveyard vista, from the perspective of an outsider looking down upon an active community. The painting mirrored my life experience at that time having just made a life-changing move. Four years later my paintings are reflecting a sense of peace and delight in daily life. Figures, which until now have been curiously absent from all my Landscapes, are slowly working their way into the architecture of some paintings. A lifetime on Union Street, painted of my neighbor two houses away during his afternoon ritual of sitting on his rocking porch bench, clearly departs from my previous ideas of Landscape. Years of my Landscape paintings lacked figures because I wanted the viewer to relate to the space directly rather than through a narrative from a figure within the space. But as I become more specific about personalizing my surroundings in paintings, I find the narratives becoming essential in depicting a space. Cars often act as figurative elements within the paintings, describing action and movement. With the exception of my depiction of my neighbor Dick, in A lifetime on Union Street, the paintings fit neatly into two categories, private and public spaces. The busy Commercial streets of Lambertville sit next to paintings, which seem to steal a peek over a fence into the privacy of a neighbor’s back yard. The Painting of Dick bridges a gap between the private and public part of life in a small knit community, where private porches open to neighbors porches. Fences and railings contain people, but neighbors are still publicly accessible to each other, an experience lost too much of suburban and urban America.

View Colette's Resumé