ENIGMAS & ENTANGLEMENTS by DENISE VERRET @ NUNU

See the exhibit by Denise Verret. 

Listening to an instinct I sometimes tend to overlook in the routine of daily life, my conscious decisions get inundated with unconscious choices and become intertwined in the act of creating art. That is where the shapes and colors, the lines and dots, and the marks and patterns come from. All these aspects make up an artistic forest isolated from the ordinary. Texture and movement also play a role within this forest.

In the last few years, I returned to painting after a foray into portraits in mixed media and collage. I was compelled to return to the roots of my earlier years as an artist when I recognized the urge to feel the motion of the physical body with the motion of the mind. But the difference now is that my paintings are elaborately detailed, which feels cathartic to me, not overwhelming. I am responding to something that possesses me, but I do not know its source. Many roots make the plant. If I had to simply analyze it, I would say it comes from a frenetic urge to initially adumbrate and then keep my hands busy. By embellishing those adumbrations, I am putting a puzzle together.

To complement these paintings, I returned to my second love, printmaking. I am currently engaged with more direct forms of printmaking like monotypes. I like the simplicity in these methods of expression, while oddly the form it takes is complex. The bowls and boxes, the myriad containers like huts and tents, are central to my paintings, so they are also central in the monotype/drawings. I don’t know where they spring from, but I have always drawn them and find them necessary and visually appealing. I do not start out with a concrete plan but let the printed surface dictate shapes, lines, and movement and create by adding and subtracting from the original monotype. I call it controlled spontaneity or disciplined energy. I am organizing a world I make up, so it becomes a maze for the viewer to travel through.

See work by additional artists emerging and mid-career artists and makers exhibiting and working at the NUNU Collective including,

Faye Abshire - Cyndi Alleman - Rex Bernard - Larry Bourque - Alvin Broussard - Ken Broussard -Jeri Bushnell - Anne Crownover - Lisa DiStefano - Merlin Donatto - Chere Doiron Ken Douet - Faye Dupre - Scott Finch - Elise Fontenot Michelle Fontenot - George Franks - Bruci Gauthier - Kathleen Guinnane - Jill Hackney - David Hebert - Janelle Hebert - Lori Henderson - Gay Herpin - Michelle Horton - Raymond Howard - Katherine Kiefer - Peter Klubek - Debbi LaGrange - Carole Lancon - Daniel Leger - George Marks - Kathy Mere - Carol Miller - David P. Morrow - Doug Nehrbass - Josy Perkins - Bach Prados - Peg Ramier - Suzi Savoy - Rebecca Simon - Ralph Schexnaydre Jr. - Debbie Tibbs - Eugene Tomko - Will Turley - Denise Verret - Peggy Walters - Kathleen Whitehurst - Karen Willingham - Lucy Yanagida

Enjoy a great evening of art, food, and conversation.

Artist Biography: Denise Verret

Denise Verret, born December 13, 1957, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, has drawn as far back as she can remember. As a young girl, she sequestered herself in her parents’ car in the warmth of their sunlit driveway, sketching self-portraits from the rear-view mirror. In 1980, she earned her undergraduate degree in art at McNeese State University in Lake Charles. Afterward, she received her MFA in painting with a minor in printmaking at the University of North Texas in Denton and soon began teaching as an assistant at UNT. In her first year, she was offered a part-time teaching position at Mountain View College in Dallas, where she taught painting, drawing, and watercolor. Throughout her undergraduate andgraduate years, Denise entered various national shows, earning recognition and awards for her art.

While holding down a day job as a concierge at the Marriott in Dallas and part-time jobs teaching art to children and the elderly, she continued teaching night classes at Mountain View for over 11 years. Once she stopped working as a concierge, she became a bookseller for The Texas Bookman in Dallas and then for Powell’s Books Wholesale in Chicago. Both these jobs took her traveling across the country as well as overseas to Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Wales, and Ireland with the added benefit of museum-hopping in her spare time working at book fairs. While living in Chicago, she concentrated mainly on mixed media drawing until the urge to paint returned and she reconnected to a kind of “automatism” in detail—an adding and subtracting approach, yet liberated from preconceived ideas of what to paint. Pattern, line, and texture are the crux of her methodology. Dadaism appeals to her, as does some Surrealism and various other schools of art, but so does the odd Medieval and Renaissance painter. There are many approaches to admire, but none to mirror.

The shapes and colors, the lines and dots, the marks and patterns in her artwork come from a plane of creativity isolated from the ordinary. There is an apparent observation of landscape, sky, water, fire, figures, and structures that infiltrate each work. Where the boxes, circles, bowls, and mazes she feels inclined to draw and paint come from, remains an enigma to her. How they end up appearing visually is a result of the quest the artist makes to express herself convincingly to the viewer.