Miranda Updike Fine Art
I received my BFA from Mass. College of Art in 1993. While there, I studied with George Nick and Jo Sandman, among other influential artists. Since graduating, I have shown my work in numerous exhibits in and around the Boston area.
In addition to exhibiting my work, I accept commissions and am especially interested in public art projects and murals.
Artist statement:
Lately, my painting has focused more on surface quality and paint texture than on subject. I have been exploring impasto, stains and washes, varnishes and waxes. With subject, I am drawn to negative spaces and strive to give substance to those voids through the use of color, texture, and contrasting sheen, as I continue to be inspired by the snippets and corners of commonplace domestic vignettes.
CROWD PAINTINGS:
Many of my recent paintings are on the subject of crowds. In our times of technology, there is little online substitute for a public gathering of bodies and souls uniting in a common cause. My paintings represent human bonding and interacting in a hi-tech era that tends to foster isolation; People joining together to share ideas, physical space, and sentiments.
Most of these crowd images are viewed from the aerial perspective. I use photographic references to abstract the idea of human movement. I'm attracted to the decorative quality of clustered or separated people, like dropped gems, confetti or beads. There is a loveliness to the accidental placement of people in the streets seen, say, from the fourteenth floor of a skyscraper - a littering of colored shapes and shadows, which move above asphalt and street lines, express a kind of contemporary splendor.