The first step to creating an emotional landscape begins with the palette, local artist Beth Dilley says. First, she approaches it from her own emotional landscape. “I lay out my palette colors, mixing and blending until I get colors that feel like where I'm at.” Next, is the creation of a focal point, “I take a piece of charcoal and scribble a few lines so I know where the movement is, what I want the eye to travel to. It’s a scribble, but it does something about dividing the canvas up into areas of interest.” Then, the canvas comes alive, Dilley explains, “I can start flooding the canvas with color.”
Dilley’s journey with abstract art, after a lifetime of mastering hyper-realism, began by experimenting with thinning down acrylics and treating them as watercolors. “It's exciting because you don't know what's going to happen until you start applying it.”
“The colors bloom,” she explains, “wet into wet, one color blooming into another, but I can go back in and bring some areas into more focus and leave some areas softer.” This loose way of painting gives the canvas itself autonomy: “The paints tell me what to do, the shapes that emerge tell me what to be.”
Each canvas is its own realization, and it shifts the paradigm for the viewer. Emotional landscapes aren’t a direct one-to-one reflection of a particular place or object, making the interpretation of the piece completely up to each individual viewer.
Dilley explains, “I want them to approach it from their own perspective so they're responding to the colors in the way that they feel those colors. I want them to come to the canvas and bring their own ideas and emotions to that piece so that they're responding to it on their terms.”
The majority of Dilley’s pieces are emotional landscapes, a paradox of organization but yet no structure at all. But the element of vagueness is really the best thing about Beth’s work. Somehow, as an artist who brings beauty and life to a canvas hung on a customer’s wall, she leaves the ball in the viewer's court: “I don't want to tell you what it is, how to feel about it.”
Beth will be teaching an evening painting class for the Town of Flower Mound in late September to guide more artists in experimenting with paint.
I want them to come to the canvas and bring their own ideas and emotions to that piece.