Seeing as We Are; Abstraction Through the Eyes of Erica Dornbusch

Erica Dornbusch ~ Afternoon Light at Northey’s Bay ~ Acrylic ~ 40x30"

In this series, I am inviting you in to sit and get a sense of a place without it being immediately recognizable. While some of the pieces are pretty literal, others convey an idea, a tone, a presence of the land, sky or water depicted.

Erica Dornbusch ~ River Lights at Harris Park ~ Acrylic ~ 20x10" ~ $325

The eye is actually a fairly passive collector of visual info. The larger part of seeing is made up by secondary perception systems of our brain. Informed by our own experience of the thing we observe, our feelings about it & our own story of the thing are all processed into our ‘seeing’. Observing with that secondary perceptual system allows for a profound and faceted witnessing of the things we experience. 

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we ourselves are. And we’re all different, we all have different systems of perception. As a visually impaired visual artist, I lean into my world with a vibrant minds eye, responding to feelings, ideas, events, sights or sounds. My aim is to tell my stories from that inner vision with which I hope to strike a deep engagement with the audience. 

In my painting process, I begin placing sections of light or colour in large blocks until there is some structure there and then I begin to respond more intuitively to the piece that is appearing. As I find flow, there's a point at which the piece seemingly begins to paint itself. I oblige, by putting pieces of light and colour and movement together as each stroke begins to inform the next. Soon, I'm replicating less and less. I focus my mark making around texture, volume, mood and light, working with gestural strokes. Often I feel as if I am writing the piece onto the canvas, more than painting it. ​

- Erica Dornbusch

See the collection for Vicki McFarland and Erica Dornbusch's "Vivid Alliances" here