Heather Guertin's artistic practice is grounded in observation, and the sensibility that a deeply imaginative expression lies latent within it.

At the heart of her painting process is the printed image.

Driving around Upstate New York, Guertin collects used books found in discarded piles at libraries and bookstores. She searches through their images with an open mind, allowing any subject matter the potential to become a source of inspiration.

Guertin uses these collages as a guide, translating the colors, textures, and forms from these found images into a pictorial language that she combines to ecstatic and exuberant effect.

Her mark-making throughout the paintings, and sometimes within one painting itself, can take many forms:

a kind of textured pointillism, with dabs of paint physically protruding from the surface; broad-brushed continuous strokes of thickly applied, opaque oil paint that which create a sense of flatness; Squiggly zig-zags that feel almost like glitches on a digital screen.

Her paintings are a riot of color, form and texture, and their compositions depict energetic shifts in tension, space, frequency and rhythm.

Although Guertin’s paintings are abstractions, her compositions often convey a sense of recognizability—though not necessarily to their source imagery.

Some compositions feel biomorphic, and others architectural. One may resemble the passing lights of cars on a freeway at dusk, and another looks like the marquee of an old theater aglow in lights. What we think we see within the paintings is a creation of our mind’s eye.