Linda Stelling doesn’t paint what she sees: instead she paints what she knows, “from my childhood, from my life. Nature first; the garden, the weather, water, atmosphere, seasonal change, environmental shifts…I absorb it from experiencing it and noticing.”
She describes color as a “physical necessity for me: color is my food.” And she washes that down with a deep perception, she says.
“I’m fascinated by how differently we each see and experience the same thing.”
Stelling’s work is also steeped in memory, dreams, and the subconscious, and she lets her work lead her brush. “I respond to how the painting wants me to go. Inspiration for me can come from anywhere. I think I’m constantly collecting things without
realizing I’m doing it at all.”
While the artist began making art at a young age, supported by a family that included those who were artists herself, her art creation has shifted and grown over the years. “Style has alway been difficult to identify from the inside. I’m highly responsive to my surroundings and experiences and these leaves residues which stick to my emotional cavity, affecting my choices…but I don’t think I am always aware of that.”
She notes that change is ineveitable for her, because she is always absorbing her art work. “I can’t remain the same. For me it would be horribly boring.”
Her art has an alchemic energy, whether she is creating landscapes with full moons or blazing suns, calming ocean waves, or bouquets of clouds. She creates abstract, hot pink and orange striations as seemingly effortlessly as she shapes figurative cloud and seascapes and flowers and a wide range of landscapes and emotional scales between the two.
“Place was a big change for me,” she says. Originally living in Wisconsin, coming to Los Angeles was exciting and challenging for her, she notes. “Sensitivity and experience gave me a different way of seeing. What changed in me is what changed the work. I think what has changed most is not necessarily how I create but how much more life I bring with me when I go to the studio.”
She adds that becoming a mother changed her “internal compass. Time became more real. Time eventually asks us to choose. Wandering has given me material. I’ve taken detours, changed environments, taught, retired, and kept making work. Time is funny thing.”
Stelling works in a wide range of mediums from painting, weaving, and wearable art, to ceramic sculpture, stained glass, and the creations of large scale installations. Her undergraduate degere in ceramic sculpture helped give her “form and dimensionality,” but painting has become her “most immediate language.”
Currently, the artist has a solo exhibition at Diversions Fine Arts in Manhattan Beach, and a near-future goal in mind, to “develop a two or multi- women show at a large space.”
In the meantime, nature is her manifestor. “[It] is sensory for me. The changing light, a sudden warm current of air that can change all movement. I notice everything…Sound, smell , vibrations, all produce a reaction and a resonance.”
Color is a big component of that manifestation. ” It’s what drives me, excites me, feeds me on so many levels. My emotional brain goes on overload. Color is how nature reaches me. The studio which is like a giant tree house that provides me with a bird’s eye view of blue water, green trees, pink and red flowers, the bluejays flying by ( stopping for the peanuts I feed them). Color is sustenance for me.” She attests that “Painting is mark making but color says what marks cannot.”
It is also an invitation from Stelling. “It pulls the viewer toward the painting and then asks them to enter it. Once inside, I’m not asking them to understand anything, just allow a memory or recognition. If I’m lucky, the viewer might leave with a sensation or a pleasure.
Diversions Fine Arts is located at 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Manhattan Beach. The exhibition runs through October 4th; there will be a curatorial walk through at 3 p.m. on October 3rd; on October 4th, an artist talk and closing reception will run from 1-3 p.m.
- Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist and by Diversions Fine Arts