GEORGETTE OSSERMAN I come to abstraction after many years as a purely figurative artist. I am a storyteller. Historically, I have chosen people and landscapes as the subjects of my paintings. These recent paintings, led by color, pattern and texture as opposed to subject matter, have been fueled by my yearning to understand art in the abstract (which I admire) and the accompanying challenge to produce a non-objective story. In pouring pigments to build layers, I have discovered that I can radically manipulate the texture, the ground, the effect and ultimately, the story of each painting. They may be glass-like in areas and rough in others; some areas bubbled and others crunched. I used different collaged elements to increase the appearance of depth in my canvases. Some I found in scrapbook stores others I tore from newspapers. From figure and landscape to collage and abstraction I now consider myself a “fusion artist”; combining the ephemeral in the recognizable (human forms and landscape) with the familiar in the unidentifiable (motion, stillness, ebullience, restraint) while creating a colloquy.
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