Meg Brown Payson
2007 Biennial Talk
Run Time: 5.34
I am fascinated by the human need to find meaningful order in a world filled with too much information. In making complex paintings which suggest many forms but that also resist being named, my work focuses on the ordering of intelligence as it exists outside the limits of language. Each surface starts as a horizontal ground of dripped and poured colors drying according to their varied natures and the dynamics of their application. I slowly add and erase dots, lines, and veils of color in search of a painting. Many different paintings can emerge from the same ground; each painting is a single order in a continuous field of possible orders. This speaks to me of the complexity and instability of meaning in the world, but also of the inevitable, if only temporary, moment of finding it.