"Her current Constellation Series is reminiscent of a mash up of Australian Dream-time drawings and particle physics.”
- Helen Lessick 2011

Constellation Series 2011

The forces that run our cosmos interest me: the insides of clouds and storms; the energy that makes our circulation throb; the thought patterns colliding in our brains. I can imagine how these forces may cause molecules to jostle and change at the micro level and I can imagine the movement of constellations at the macro level. They hover in space and their energy compels progression, explosion and growth patterns. The dots can represent the unseen world of throbbing particles and minute life forms seen in microscopes.

The journey starts from a single point and continues without conscious plan. Thousands of dots accrete gradually into form. They move into color masses that coalesce and disintegrate like flocks of birds. Each small dot is individual as it swarms with its fellows and navigates by some pulse of its own choosing. They can resemble groups of molecules captured for a fleeting moment then fading out of sight like fire flies or stars at dawn.

With this inquiry I feel closer to my heroes Paul Klee and Matta and the Aboriginal Painters. Their wit and candor sit with me.

Clouds are an ongoing theme that I return to again and again. It could be that living in Oregon for the bigger share of my life and witnessing cloud banks, fog, drizzle and downpours for months on end have given me an edge into the semi-translucent quality of those illusive things. I have walked into them while hiking, walked under them on Mt. Hood, watched them roll in and bump into the Cascade Range and then drop snow up high and rain on me.

Random patterns have become a specialty. They can mass and expand like birds or whirlpools. They can puff up and rumble, then dribble out into nothing. They can run in long strings like beads and curl like snails. In other words, when I am reduced to mere dots the pages flood with lines and mass and form and pattern (and color).

Commentary


Paula Overbay’s recent work harnesses the point to create marvelous forms of complexity and nuance.

Beginning with a single point she creates complex fields referencing clouds, spores and nuclear explosion. Her abstracted works, imbued with intellect, seem to reference fractals and needlepoint, cloud nebulae and electrons as they flip between microscope and telescope perspective. Her current constellation series is reminiscent of a mash up of Australian dream-time drawings and particle physics.

Overbay’s simple point, applied with the specificity of a dot printer, builds form and volume. Her technique accumulates these points with a gestural structure, with dotted lines eddying into a unresolved vortex in the smaller pieces.

Harnessing color in the dots that are, most often, 1/32 of an inch wide, Overbay plays with atmosphere. Thousands of marks accrete into form. Her numinous pale orange and yellow dots float on a textured gray paper, reminiscent of a dawn cloud in the desert. In one large works, she lets a single red dot fly solo, launched from an exquisite string of relatives. Other works place a turquoise dot within a red dot, creating optical frisson and a type of rococo minimalism.

Occasionally, Overbay’s accumulation process results in recognizable form, from an unraveling nightshirt or undersea creature. These works are witty, but distract from the artist’s discovery of the page. An artist of possibility, Overbay’s best works are a journey, starting without knowing the end, guided by her lodestone of color and space. Whatever her process or subject, Overbay’s works on paper show a presence of mind and focused inquiry harnessed to impressive and contemplative technique. This is an artist of curiosity and passion examining the tenor of clouds.

March 2011 Studio Visit Helen Lessick, Public Art Collections Manager Los Angeles CA

Stillness and Occurrence

I was looking at water a few years ago and tried to imagine the building of color in the water as it became deeper. That's a simple idea. But to make it happen in the studio I had to tear down every concept that I had about how a painting was constructed: no easel (work flat on a table); no oil paint (only thin acrylic medium and a hint of color) no palette (only cups and vats and jars of mixed color). And a mask to protect my lungs from the acrylic vapors. This yearning for luminosity and depth got me up early every day searching for the proper way to mix and layer. By the end of the second year when I went to the Ragdale Foundation, I could do it.
As the thin transparent layers slowly build they become saturated with hue, glazed and luminous and deep. I have given up hope of putting a number on them-if I work for months and put on two or three layers a day-well, that makes many layers. After a few months, they are sanded down and the interior becomes visible. Then the building begins all over again.
The images carry light. They have spots and glimmer within them. One piece called "Capsule" looks like it has been drenched and stained with raspberries. Another called "Cells" looks like the slice of a plant under a microscope as it is growing. Some are bubbly and lively on their surfaces, all the history showing through. Others have pearls. Some have tiny puddles and dots. This was the beginning of a lengthy series.

Stillness and Occurrence: "Space and that which is continuously born out of space and returns into space". -Pema Chodron

Pema Chodron was talking about Buddhism, about being balanced within the activity that always surrounds us and pulls at us and demands our thoughts and energies. These paintings are contemplative paintings about balance and polarities. They are all square pieces with a still central image and an active surface. They are meant to be looked into and not just upon.

The "Occurrence" areas of the paintings (the background) are full of my favorite things: dots, pinpricks, blobs and blotches of all sorts, transparent and opaque, big and small. The "Stillness" areas are also full of my favorite things but it is a mystery to me about why these particular pared down images are important for me to paint (and continue to paint). The central core of the body, the backbone, the safety of the enclosure, keeping out fear and anxiety, the gathering of human circles are possibilities. We have all had our safety diminished. Perhaps this is my response.

Grisaille Series

I had been working on a deep and beautiful surface of layers and layers of pigment thinned with matte medium which had become the customary way to begin a painting. After a few months of this, or longer, they would develop a deep wax-like surface, very seductive and tactile. I wanted to leave them alone, call them done. But they weren’t done. I tried to just cover a portion of the surface and that only brought me to the “figure-ground” position again and that wasn’t satisfying or correct.

While listening to the radio one Saturday morning I heard the word “kenosis” being spoken by a South African minister. To him it meant “to surrender”; to the Greeks it meant “to be mindless”. Both of these meanings felt true in a way that no other language had felt. So after a good while of surrendering to the fact that I didn’t have a solution, and furthermore I was going to have to give up that surface in order to find the solution, I covered the entire surface with dots that did not overlap or touch. These dots became a pattern, a new element. And some of the undersurface could filter through which was an element of filigree. The gray color is new and the same value pattern in relation to the surface is new.

I was in my garden all summer and so were three monarch butterflies. It finally struck me that their abstracted form-a vertical stripe with equal space on either side-was the form that I had been looking for. I had to be quietly in the garden enough and emptying out my head enough before that connection could surface and take shape. The surfaces became dense with dot patterns, many layers of patterns and then sanding in between.

I began my professional life with two degrees in printmaking: a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland Oregon and an MFA from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. The training gave me a feeling for covering a surface making every square inch equally as important as any other square inch. The ideas about layering color to obtain depth and luminosity sprang from there also.

The work is repetitive and a source of great contemplation. I am drawing from my long background of yoga and its ritual forms of meditation to arrive at images of balance.

The images are chosen for their simplicity and symbolism, this series with broken circles and divided sides. They could be read as pure abstraction, which they are, but the impetus for choosing them was to talk about our divisive conflicted world of extreme sides and our lack of control over such a world.

Many of these pieces were created at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest Illinois just as I was beginning to make this new work. These were the first paintings using acrylic mediums and breaking away from the oil painting tradition as I was seeking new ways to make luminous surfaces. I am extrelely grateful for the time that was given to me.