Pamela Schermer

Last Peach of Summer.
Oil/casein on linen.
16" x 20."

Painters are not scholars or historians; we comment upon painting by making paintings. My own recent series of paintings are Baroque fantasias that borrow visual codes of beauty from seventeenth-century Italian and Dutch still-life painting. As I do not have access to the original works of art upon which I base my work, I use the library's collections to inform and inspire me.

I spend many hours in the library, returning to the same sources day after day for many years. I study, analyze, and make extensive drawings from reproductions of the works of art that I wish to absorb into my process. The question that I ask is "How did these artists construct their creations?" The answer is more than simply an intellectual exercise. In my work, I try to re-imagine the original rhapsodic pleasures of their making, and I try to find some analogy to my own.

Nocturne.
Oil/casein on linen.
24" x 24"

My sources, then, are transformed and synthesized through a gestational process built out of complex associations that invite metaphorical flights of fantasy. In fact, my research process mirrors the themes of growth and genesis that are embodied in both my paintings and the original Baroque sources. Relationships form, shift, and gather together in new meanings. In the end, my work alludes to fragments of the world of images that belong both to the library and to our own lives.