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

The genesis for Guertin’s newest body of oil paintings begins as a series of collages she creates from the pages of scientific journals, discarded books and magazines.

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.