The wood, the real and imagined wood-both before and after she had entered it with Penny-had always been simultaneously a source of attraction and a source of discomfort, shading into terror. The light in the woods was more golden and darkly shadowed than any light on city terraces
- AS Byatt, The Thing in the Forest, from Little Black Book of Stories

Shortly before hanging this show, it occurred to me that the title, Into the Wild, was an apt metaphor, not only for the imagery: woodland habitation, but also for the steps I was taking into the unknown, in materials, technique and subject.

The focus of my work has continually shifted between several themes: the atmospheric landscape / the figure as an abstraction of form and color / the narrative that occurs when the painted figure enters the painted place. After years of painting the landscape, and painting and drawing the figure in interiors, this body of work merges the two.

Mostly wooded and often dark, the places my figures inhabit are conjured from memory and imagination. Reflecting on the Germanic fairy tales of my childhood and mixing it with a dose of my current life in a semi-wooded area of Connecticut, I’ve re-imagined characters and situations from a grown-up perspective. In the past, when painting interior scenes, I have used a piece of furniture to serve as a character. In these newer pieces, I rely on shapely trees or bodies of water.

Color, light, form and structure are the essential components that provide limitless compositional challenges as well as a framework upon which I suspend images, both observed and remembered. I hope to continue to explore new media and new ways of revealing the poetry and mystery in the familiar, visible world.

Hess Hesselgrave

Hess Hesselgrave