Artists create lexicons – brushstrokes, marks, scrapings, drips, motifs – and use this visual language to create nonverbal “stories.” Viewers take pleasure in “reading” these stories.
Debi Pendell’s works are investigations of semiotics, language, and meaning based in the format of landscape painting. Concentrating on abstract elements of recognizable shapes and characters in combination with materials and processes, Pendell plays with symbols of both visual art and various language systems and how people “read” them and make meaning from them.
Letters, numbers, math equations and such are used abstractly, serving as value, texture, pattern and spatial indicators. Trees, birds, circles, and other images are used as abstract symbols in the same way.
At times, Pendell uses the motifs of trees, letters, equations, etc. only sparingly, focusing on creating abstract, nonspecific landscape spaces painted in acrylics over an underlying base of textured collage. The collage provides a structure on which the painting can rest, loose and free. Pendell’s work is neither defined fully by abstraction nor representation, rather it plays with both the joining of the two and the ways in which they remain dissimilar.
In the more spare works, the visual language of artmaking is dominant. Surprisingly, the spare use of other language systems, such as letters and math symbols, highlights their importance, allowing the viewer to ponder their meaning within this unexpected landscape context.
Debi Pendell’s work can be viewed on her website, debipendell.com, and in her Eclipse Mill studio by appointment.