Valentine Aprile

Lives and works in Baltimore, MD, USA

Artist statement

My oil paintings are psychological image stories marrying abstract passages of color dripping and brushwork, and representational and figurative modes, from life study to historical references and personal photo files. I blend traditional oil painting techniques with intuitive improvisation, allowing freedom of play to coexist with hard practiced skill. The characteristics of oil paint exist and bend in relation to my subjects and symbols by balancing transparent layers against more opaque, applicative and reductive methods. I aim to engage viewers with suggestions and deliveries of complex cultural content: I explore themes of identity, justice, equity, power, and survival; seek connectedness between my mixed ancestral past with present societal issues; and research women’s movements and conditions in society and art. I ask questions about my place in culture, as the whole person I am. Investigations of cultural standards including such issues as one’s license to speak as a woman, as an artist, are preeminent in my paintings. I try to wrestle with the compulsion to speak truth and I aim to rebel against limiting ideas of “goodness” by employing sometimes graphic disruptions before and alongside pictorial resolutions and as pictures resolve I often unsettle things by incorporating language and words that retain raw feelings, shouts of politics, personhood and sexuality. Traditional methods are used to deploy experimental and imaginative thinking, not just in composition...

Artwork