Statement

Because I’ve been a dancer, a hockey player, a violinist, I see line (the body, the ball, the bow) in three dimensions, as carving space.  Drawing, influenced also by my experience in calligraphy and magazine illustration, asserts itself with sometimes humorous effect.   Biomorphic and geometric shapes on the edge of recognition budge into each other, with minimal attention to logic and convention.  Dealing with random associations from multiple directions, the paintings physically carve out a performative space of triggered memory and overlapping timeframes, the meanderings of a modern sensibility.  In convoluted conversations, they conduct a running background narrative about imagination rumbling along crossed wires.  

In my pursuit of intuitive dredging and its entanglements, I enjoy creating a treasure hunt for the viewer to accompany me.  Like a teasing map, I often work in from the edges, revealing and inventing pathways that often lead somewhere unexpected as the painting develops. Investigating these contrary positions in the same space seems a modern preoccupation to me.  The generous medium of acrylic paint and its additive properties propels invention and revelation at the same speed as the ultimate aggregator, the imagination.  Titles come in the late stages of the paintings, when I begin to relax back into the humor of the struggle to resolve life’s randomness.

Pamela Keravuori is an American artist whose mixed-media paintings combine expressive markmaking and controlled but colorful energy to explore visual metaphors from a long, passionate and only sometimes comprehensible life. After a 30-year hiatus, Keravuori currently works from her new light-filled studio in the Virginia treetops. From hitchhiking across the US and Europe to raising her four children behind the Iron Curtain and on a UN mission in the Middle East, she paints the contradictions and fragments of her peripatetic life.