Brit Borcher Artist Statement:
Painting provides me with the opportunity to witness chance and intention mingle and converse. What began as strategic games with paint in the studio has since developed into methods of facture that speak to both the rational and irrational including adjustment, removal, embellishment and demolition. I utilize these methods in successive layers to build an image that is not predetermined, but instead, develops throughout the process.
My work begins with automatic painting, shooting streams of paint, or dripping paint down a vertical surface. Then solid shapes are imposed to weigh down, pin or highlight particularly striking passages. Cutting into the composition by painting portals shifts the image and moves the process forward. Through the repetition and variations of these steps, the final picture gradually emerges.
I am interested in the tension that arises when seemingly “oppositional” forces meet, or more precisely, when a pool of goopy gelatin runs into a solid shape, resulting in a rain of gravity-defying splatters and squirts. This process often results in a disorienting composition that seesaws back and forth, hinting at convergence but remaining unapologetically incongruent.