Featured Artist Linda Dumont

Linda Dumont’s expressive paintings and pastels flow with color, joy and movement. View her website to learn more about this artist and her work.

 

 

I see color and shape in the world around me. My daily life is fed by the environment—light, atmosphere, a figure, a smile, a laugh or something as simple as an olive or a pear. These inspirations give energy and substance to my work. My work wants to be made and I am grateful it wants to be made through me.

 

 

Painting has always been integral to who I am. My great uncle was Joseph Margulies. My great aunt was married to Marc Rothko. Discussions at our extended family gatherings seamlessly blended art into topics from politics to the anticipation of the birth of a new baby.

 

 

My youth was filled with movement and sport. Sitting still was tortuous; I wanted to run on the beach, dance in fields, skate across ponds. So, when I first went to Uncle Joseph’s New York City studio, overwhelmed by the beauty of his work, I tried to imitate his style.

 

 

Despite my best effort to see and paint as he did, it just wasn’t me. I need to move as I share the color and shape of what I see.

 

 

While at SMFA at Tufts, I studied the classics and realism. The rigor of that study gave me the bones I needed to produce my work, but I knew there had to be something more. I wanted to grab an energy that was lacking in realism for me. I found this in the work of Helen Frankenthaler. Her art spoke to me in a way none had before.

 

 

To this day, my paintings have to have bones, a skeleton of sorts, before I can move to expression. My paintings and sculptures aren’t impulsive. I embrace something before I go into the fantasy of expression. That expression is like a silent conversation with the canvas, me grabbing color and the canvas responding. We have a one-on-one relationship until I’m done. If I overthink it, I destroy the looseness.

 

 

I may start at one place and end up someplace else entirely, but the initial structure gives meaning to the conversation itself. And the process is full of joy and vigor. I paint with the canvas against a wall rather than on an easel because the strength and energy of the process needs bracing to sustain it.

 

 

I stretch my own canvases. This process of sponging and gluing the canvas means I become part of the materials themselves and don’t want to waste them. It also creates a drum-like quality to the canvas such that the paint can be felt and seen better than any other method I’ve found.

 

 

I also like to work on sculptured maple which I prime to get the slick, hard feeling of ice. The sculptured wood allows me to move painting into a third dimension.

 

 

My vision keeps expanding. Sometimes there is more form; sometimes there is less. But always my vision runs contrary to life dictated by endless rules, conformity and allowing information to overtake imagination. I hope that my art will open those who view it to the mystery, joy, fantasy and love that is here. In the process, may we all find the beauty of letting go of outcome.

 

Artist Linda Dumont invites you to follow her on Instagram and Facebook.

 

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