Mindy Flexer
Ascent, 2016
Oil paint on linen mounted on wood panel
40 x 30"

About the work

This painting is from a series I made using the humble pig. These paintings are about love and home and family, and the big wheel of time turning. Each generation raises its children, loves them, falls short, comes through, and then has to see them go. This is us: impermanent and enduring, separate and together, different as we share the same world.

That world remains familiar and unknowable, around us and beyond us. Our own conflicting desires are also confounding: we long for home and safety, and to voyage into the unknown. We want to belong and to separate, to be unique and no different, to change and to be as before. We are curious and clever creatures, outmatched by our searching and what we find.

Paint is the perfect material for a mysterious creature regarding a mysterious world. It can create color, light, and form--- this physical world we know. At the same time, it can defy gravity and all the other physical truths we live with. Painting can make the world anew. It can use the seen to look for the unseeable.

I am grateful to share the ongoing mystery of being here with everyone and everything that is. I am grateful for the work of painting, and for being outmatched by the task- always.

Bio

Mindy Flexer is a professional realist painter, teaching artist, and climate activist. Her live-work loft houses Mindy Flexer Art School, her own painting studio, and is a hub for climate justice art builds and other community art projects. She has exhibited her work at venues that include Woodmere Art Museum, the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Art in City Hall, Cerulean Arts, Artists' House Gallery, and national painting festivals in Pennsylvania and Maryland. She has collaborated on climate activism projects with Earth Quaker Action Team, POWER Interfaith, Sunrise Movement, Kelly School, and Coleman Library.

Flexer has taught art at Greene Street Friends School, the Charter High School for Art and Design, and Woodmere Art Museum, where she does annual immersive eco-installations in the Millard Children's Gallery. She holds a BA from Oberlin College, a BFA from The University of the Arts, and an M.Ed. in Art from Tyler School of Art. Flexer loves sharing her passion for art with people of all ages and walks of life, and believes in the power of art to unite and transform people and communities.

www.mindyflexer.com
Instagram - @mindyflexer