Sandra Bloodworth Home
My paintings are a progression. For many years, I have been predominately a figurative painter with an emphasis on portraits, attempting to capture the personality of the subject and, in turn, reveal some of my own.
Over time the portraits of people that dominated my work expanded to also be portraits of meals - intimate, personal representations of particular shared events, a slightly different reflection of contemporary culture. The work grew from a shared life with my husband, Fred May, a life that treats meals as Intimate Feasts, whether dining alone or with friends or family. It is not the food I try to capture, but rather the moment, the people,the shared experience.
Fred inspires the menu and I create the table setting. The settings are sculptural, with strong colors and textures showcasing the dishes that are in themselves works of art. Many of the decisions in the paintings, including color, are made during the preparation of the meal, so that color choice may be driven by the food, the season or a particular event. It is as if the work is a performance art piece, gathering colors form the garden, selecting dinnerware from a growing inventory and pulling out table linens from the closet where they are arranged in a way that makes you feel you are in the middle of a color wheel.
The consumption of the meal is the performance. They are lush and at times, sensual...they are a response to the chaos of life; those things that are beyond control Within the two-foot square, I have the ability to celebrate that which is good and at peace, a small window of the world that is in harmony.
Each painting is titled by the date and time the meal was consumed, capturing the unique moment when still life had three dimensions.
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