Kerri Scharlin

Artist Statement

In Her Studio is an ongoing series of paintings I’ve been making since 2015. The impetus for the project was the realization that I had lost touch with many of my art world connections. I stopped going to openings when I had my first child in 1997. When I forced myself to go again in 2014 I remember the strange and alienating feeling of not recognizing a soul. To get connected again, I started googling, to find who was out there, who inspired me. I thought if I painted people I would meet them. My work has always been about groups of women, but those women always used to be reflections of me. Here, I am creating a group of women and insisting on their relationship to myself.

I begin the project by collecting images of artists in studios from mostly online sources and make line drawings. I found I could use the line drawings as scaffolding for paintings. As the drawings transform into paintings, my brush has to navigate around the lines that demarcate these women, their work, their supplies. I’m not painting the women as much as using line drawings to make paintings. The line drawings act as fences and I’m playing inside the yards.

As the project has evolved I have been continuing to question what kind of images I want to make. Through exploring and coming to know these women artists’ work, I’m using them as inspiration to construct my own work, and learning what I want to make. The paintings become about exploration and organically evolve as the project evolves.

• issue #25: "In Her Studio"