from 25 Random Paintings by Karla Van Vliet

These pieces are four paintings from a lager project titled 25 Random Paintings. These paintings measure 3” x 5” and the twenty-five are held in a small wooden box.

The impetus for these paintings came from a dream I had about a year ago. In the dream I am trying to push my way through a wall. My friends are saying you do it like this, by moving into the spaces between the molecules, and they move through. I am thinking, with my head against the wall, there is no way this will work, and then it does and I move through the wall.

This dream got me thinking about the space within the structures of our world, external and internal. I made a painting of the wing of a dragonfly. Within that structure I saw the similarity of other structures in the world, cells, trees, waterways. These small paintings play with the similarity of the roots, trunk, and branches of a tree and the rock strewn body of a stream bed. But held, too, are the images of cells, in blood, in water.