My name is Christa Gulaian. I live in La Garita CO.
This painting is made up of 7 canvases, each of which is also a standalone painting. It was created as the final piece for a show made up of works that were completed between January 2020 and July of 2022. This was a period of many personal challenges and losses which were largely processed while I painted.
This piece was a challenge to myself to create a centerpiece to the show as well as sort of capstone to a certain creative period in my life. It felt like a shift from the isolation of Covid and a time of self-reflection to brighter days.
The painting was started on the floor, all seven canvases together for the underpainting, acrylic paint mixed with water and sprayed across the combined surfaces. Each Canvas was also worked individually on the easel with oil paints to create a unique and separate painting.
After working a painting, I would then place it again with the others on the floor and work the larger piece has a whole. Each piece is indispensable to the larger painting but can also stand alone.
This idea that each piece is important by itself, separate from the larger whole, feels true to life.
It speaks to the period when this was painted, a time following the unexpected loss of my sister Amy, the one person in the world who knew my mind, and my mom a year later. Soon after that, we sold the family home of 54 years.
With every loss we must remember that our loved ones are still part of us and that our unique stories are themselves a whole picture.
My palette and process are largely inspired by my time in the woods. I work as a Forester, mostly by myself, experiencing the landscape and all its life, making observations, walking many miles a day. I've been out in the same areas for 20 years observing shifts and changes, I’ve seen how native bark beetles, fires, drought, and other stresses can kill the trees; but how also the forest remains resilient.
I incorporate the feeling of space and time, of curiosity and change into my paintings by accepting that nothing on the canvas is necessarily permanent, that additions and subtractions are all part of the outcome. While I might call a painting finished, I know that it can morph through the eyes of each individual who views it. Exploration through painting and the always unique response of viewers are what makes me excited to start my next piece.
