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This website presents samples of my visual work over the years—my painting, artist’s books, drawing, and my work in all genres related to the impact of medicine on individuals and on our culture.

I hope my visitor will note the many LECTURES I have given and the ARTICLES I have published.  They are an index of the way ideas flow between my visual and verbal work.  The intellectual and verbal aspects of my experience are as central to my visual art as are my experiences living in a woman’s body, suffering certain diseases, or raising children.  The life of the mind is as consuming to me as the emotional life and personal history.

I am a self-taught painter, working in acrylic.  PAINTING is a means of reflection for me.

While paintings are usually the most forceful-looking works I make, the process of making them is the most tenuous.  They require extended, open-ended time, and I inevitably grope with my materials.  Painting is sustained discomfort with a vague promise.  The final images generate themselves from seminal marks, so any initial conception I may be foolish enough to form about an end is dissipated early on.

The work I produce surprises me each time by crystallizing thought or formulating feeling I recognize only at the end.  It is as if something invisible has been brought into being, distilled from the air by the miserable discomfort of patient, physical process.

In the ARTIST BOOKS, my intelligence, vision, history, and my need to make both images and words, come together.  The extensive body of this work is unified by intimacy, intensity, and an aesthetic that values the book as conveyance rather than as object.  The codex is infinitely expressive, and I use its range for humor, horror, the definition of a mood that’s hard to capture, or the telling of a simple story.

Books have the potential to get burned or banned.  I relate to that history of urgency.  I use books to examine authority, since the book is one of authority’s primary vehicles.

And MEDICINE’S is one of those authoritative voices often found in my books.  The position of medicine in our culture is a theme in my work, one on which I have lectured extensively in connection with my art.

My fascination with the penetration of medicine’s point of view into quotidian self-perception finds its way into my paintings, drawings, and books.  My concern with medicine’s authority gives me another way to investigate language and its power.

My interest in the medicalization of the body has taken me into privileged settings and given me the opportunity to draw human anatomy as a subject for emotional exploration.  My series of portrait DRAWINGS of anomalously developed human infants and fetuses mirror my sense of myself as fragile human, as mother, lover, and engaged human being, with whatever reluctance or pain one elects to be so.

MY ART OFTEN TAKES THE VIEWER PLACES ONE MIGHT HESITATE TO GO:  The locked wards of psychiatric hospitals and the laboratories where these unviable infant bodies are preserved.  I see women struggling to survive suburban privilege.  I ask if cannibalism is sufficiently understood to be wholly damned.

The events and emotions of my life are the basis for my work.  But autobiography is not formal; it is more complex than art can encompass.  So I create personae in my work as lifelines I devise for myself and others.  These I throw out to the vast world of people who might recognize themselves through my work, who might have questions like mine, who are sufferers of madness, mysterious pains, and doubtful doubts.

Ann Starr
Columbus, Ohio
2006
 
 


 
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