Kent Library's Artist of the Month Blog: August Artist of the Month: Tilly Strauss

Artist statement 2021

I once tried not to be an artist. And I failed. I need to paint or draw a work of art every single day. It is necessary for me to attend to this passion, or I will start to wither, wane, dissolve, rage, flip out and disappear. Through a strict daily process and discipline, I have found a voice for the wordless stuff inside me. I am able to arrest time and capture memories and make fleeting juxtapositions that feel like celebrations to enlighten and transform. Afterwards, my thousands of paintings and drawing become portals leading beyond our linear construct of time and space.

When I was about 6 years old, I watched Sandy Calder, the sculptor and neighbor of my grandmother in France, “work” in his studio. I knew he was living a magical life as a grown up. I wanted to live like him. My childhood as a military brat, had me moving from place to place and it rattled my shy vocabulary, until painting became my most useful and important language.

My studio is full of wet panels, stacks of painted papers, empty frames, found nests, brilliant flowers, eggs, miniature chairs, maps, and teacups. Looking about, I see a vocabulary of images that make a virtual dictionary of metaphors for my journey through this life.

Because I feel transient as a species and have lived a life of constant relocation and movement, the perpetual conflict between leaving and being is evident everywhere in my work. I don’t feel that I have time to get fussy about my narratives, or my process. I just do my best to show up. A key can be the ritual of arriving, donning the apron, and choosing the subject. Each image freezes a moment that I can physically carry with me.

Leaving or staying is a constant question. I emphasize the duplicity of focus when laying bare the anxieties of our time by using a whimsical palette, some playful brushwork and the very lightness of imagery. Brushstrokes, text, and details from nature are strategies I explore in transforming the paint to be memory and harvesting the spiritual to be paint.

Bio of Tilly Strauss

Rural NY painter, historian, teacher, traveler

Mother, daughter, sister, friend…

Having been a painter her whole life, (she exhibited in her first show at age 5), Tilly Strauss loves history and teaching the process of painting to others. She studied art under her uncles and aunts and earned a BFA and BA from Colorado University in Boulder. A widely recognized artist from the northeast, Strauss has exhibited consistently for several decades. Since living in Miami, she has exhibited and won awards with her work at the Deering Estate, the South Florida Art Center, with the Miami Parking Authority in Wynwood, at the Miami International University of Art and Design, and at the Miami Dade Public Library as well as at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, the Akin Museum in Pawling NY and the Hammond Museum in North Salem.

Since 2006, Strauss has been a daily painter, living with a strict routine of artmaking. She often paints in public and always keeps a sketchbook with her. Convinced she is one of the fastest painters she knows, she was thrilled to learn that her great (x15) grandfather, Lucas Cranach, was also known for his speed. He was known in the 1400’s as the “Pictor Celerimus”, which translates into the “fast painter”.

Strauss has been teaching art to kids and adults for the last 25 years. It is one of her main joys in life. She spent three months of the fall of 2020 teaching art history and watercolor in Zermatt, Switzerland and currently runs a summer enrichment camp for young kids in Millerton NY.

For more information feel free to email her at: Tillystudio@aol.com

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www.tillystudio.com