Beth Woronoff Brown

Lives and works in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico

Artist statement

Improbable Outcomes is a process based personal partnership between movement research and paintings in which I explore unique compositions within each painting. The subject matter are the forces and resultants that affect a body and the geography of an imaginary planet coexisting in the same time and space as Earth. This project began as I attempted to understand the geopolitics of our times. The Gaza Genocide, the war in Ukrane, the politics in the US and many other issues deeply trouble me and if I allow it, it affects me physically. I wonder; ‘Why has everything turned out just as it has?’. It all seems so random and yet so very specific and inevitable in its outcomes. I made a connection to my own abstract painting practice. There too my outcomes seemed random. I could have made so many other choices and yet these were the choices I made. I realize that my choices depended on subconscious affinities derived from periods of observation and so it is not random but an expression of who I am. I began to see that there was a way to depict forces and their opposites within a painting. I used my movement practice to explore forces that a body can exert and depict such as pressure, repulsion, heavy or light gravity, rates of flow, speed and slow motion, orders within chaos. I came to paint with an overall composition in mind, consisting of a specific movement idea. Then I make a first layer that is quite random. This becomes the starting place, alive with thousands of...