... ... Marilyn Higginson | ART Elements Gallery

Marilyn Higginson


Landscape Painter and Sculptor

Painting in rural Oregon renews and strengthens Marilyn Higginson’s belief in the importance of Nature to the human spirit; her work is about that. She is interested in the play of light and shadow, creating abstract shapes and volumes that draw her into a scene. Marilyn does a lot of walking across the fields and through wooded areas, conscious of creating pathways into her paintings that can be followed to the horizon. The paths are often broken or obscured – as in life – but the way reveals itself. In her newer images, there is a greater sense of distance, drawing one still deeper. The surfaces of her work are relatively smooth; this is especially true in the skies, which are often seamless blends of hue and value. Marilyn believes strongly that because light reflection creates a sort of "jacquard" effect, surface texture distracts from the imagery and she takes care to minimize it. Also for this reason, her paintings have little gloss and appear rather dry. Marilyn often uses worn brushes, rags and other objects as erasers, removing paint as a drawing technique.

I am enchanted by nature and extreme measures of time; (apparently) immutable stone and landforms, eroded by wind and water over millennia, dwarfing the human lifespan. I have expressed these fascinations through several media over the years, but have come to landscape painting as my primary voice. My work has nearly always been about natural forms and my relationship to the land. In that way, all of my work, whether painting or sculpture, flows from the same headwaters. I think of myself as a messenger depicting specific moments of time and mood. The twilight hours of dawn and dusk are exquisitely lonely and melancholy, yet full of peace and promise. I am interested in the dormant seasons, when life is quiet and preparing to renew itself. Fog is still and enveloping and seamless. There is a mysterious silence in snow, not experienced in any other weather. These are solitary and reflective times, about transition.