Natalie Alper​

I walk the tightrope between the conceptual and the instinctive "not knowing" present in the sensual, pressured, rapid, physical making of my work.  I'm excited by the continuous interchange of form and energy on so many levels of life with all the hopes that dynamic processes offer and the turbulent danger of unexpected outcome.

When I began in the '70's, my work was spare and reductive with no room for the idiosyncratic.  Homogeneity of surface and energy formed a tense, hermetic presence.  I felt cornered!  I needed to make work with a fuller range of feeling, with a larger arena of options, spawning unpredictable paintings that couldn't be completed in my head.

Finally, its present form began to emerge.  Not a gestural inventory of marks but rather a complexly drawn matrix of energy and form that cannot be sequentially unraveled. Changing configurations repeat and evolve from my first touch, as cells may develop to form an organism, where the coding within tells it what it will become.  My own physical energy, visible and palpable in the work and its making, affirms for me the human and the unpredictable in an increasingly impersonal world.