From her earliest beginnings, Marlana Stoddard Hayes has been inspired to use elements of nature in her painting practice, but now does so within a contemporary context. Over the years she has developed a cross-fielding system of information input, using elements in her garden as living subjects, along with extensive collections of artifacts and a personal reference library. Her work explores plant and biological forms that are an outgrowth of the inspiration these sources provide.
Long interested in living communities, Stoddard uses images to explore the relationship among various nested systems found in the natural world. Over the past five years, she answered the call to use spore prints from the fungi growing under her trees as a vehicle to embellish the work of her hands. Finding that the pigmentation qualities of the spores could be massaged by timing and temperature, she has refined their use to augment the chemical manipulations she employs in her work.
Trained as a calligrapher in her foundation years, she has always recognized the power and transmissive energy of each human nervous system, and how losing contact with this integral part of our humanity may leave us compromised. It is her personal mission to continue to inspire and teach others that by using simple tools, along with refined powers of mental concentration, they can reach higher levels of performance in everyday tasks.
Her Works...
Although this particular piece is not displayed at the fine arts center, many of the paintings are done in the same fashion.It's a very interesting procedure that I don't fully understand. I've been doing research on it and from what I understand, she uses a very specific oil based paint made for her in Oregon State. She uses walnut oil and mineral spirits, lace doileys, and most surprising... Mushroom spores! Apparently different mushroom spores make different patterns. It's amazing that she came up with such a strange combination of media and the result is fantastic. Each spore print is very unique and reminds me of a combination of snowflake and jellyfish. It's very abstract, and yet not abstract at all. She has gone over some of her paintings with fifty coats. The colors are amazing. Some of her paintings are very cold like the one above using mostly blues and greens. Others use a lot of reds and pinks making them seem very warm. The closer you stand to her paintings, the more intricate they seem. The further back you get, the more you appriciate how her colors and shapes compliment each other. She had a few landscape paintings that didn't use the mushroom spores, but still used the walnut oil/lace to creat a fractured texture that I thought worked well in the large sky. There were also two fruit bowls with similar media. They were both well done, but seemed out of place. Overall it was a fun experience, and an eye-opener to the fact that experimentation can actually have positive results. I was also able to view some outdoor art by other artists that was very interesting as well.