TL SOLIEN | The Lonesome Dervish | January 16 – February 19, 2022

My process is almost entirely intuitive. I begin with an image, either extracted from an outside source, historical or contemporary, or selected and de-contextualized from my own 50-year history of making works of art, creating figural characters and other motifs. This image begins a process of building, via free association. Painted passages, either representational or abstract, are added to the original image, one at a time, in an intuitive response to what came before them. Eventually, enough imagistic and material information has accumulated, that it begins to suggest a rebus-like narrative structure that I can move in one subjective direction or another. — TL Solien

It is of utmost importance to me that the subjective terms of the developing painting, in the end, reflect the reality of my life experience and functions as an accurate allegory of what I imagine to be the state of our contemporary consciousness. Throughout this process, images appear and disappear, and color is applied and altered until the painting seems “centered”, and to me, undeniably “real”. — TL Solien

My process relies on my making intuitive decisions from start to finish. It is treacherous to walk on such a narrow path, with failure lurking around every corner, trying to manufacture a meaningful subjective mechanism, from bits and pieces retrieved from the “Dustbin of History. — TL Solien

From the beginning of his career until now, the landscape of the upper Midwest has left an indelible mark on Solien’s work, “The land is flat, the space is so deep that it seems shallow, and the sense of scale is often distorted.” Landscape is often the setting for and stage upon which TL Solien’s characters experience significant changes or depart on life-changing journeys. — Christopher Atkins