About

The results of a lifetime of making art mixed with a college education and life in a city that had everything from terrorist attacks, creative masters, Tibetan masters, close cardinal friends, and neighbors from around the world reflected on to Iyekudo’s canvas. Maturity brings deeper awareness of the countless forms of consciousness around ourselves. The simplicity and directness of pencil and paper or brush and canvas is direct connection in the circuit of seeing, thinking, and picture making.

It was a special time when Iyekudo allowed herself to draw a puppy or make multiple paintings of horses. It was not cosmopolitan and not necessarily contemporary. It became contemplative. It became movement beyond the initial view to look deeper into someone else who had their own range of inner experience. Sometimes the selfhood of the subject was expressed in its physical movement, and sometimes it was expressed in the movement of the brush. Many times, the color of the mind spilled across the canvas as a reflection of the inner worlds of these beings. These became methods to echo the qualities of an individual that are beyond words and conceptual descriptions. The surfaces for paint or pencil became portals to reconnect with something that could get lost in our conditioning to rest attention on the more superficial qualities of the life around ourselves. This openness to the inner experience of others became a connection to this world shared with all living things in it. It becomes a sustaining part of one’s life.

Finished paintings begin with thought about the subject, which quickly turns into minimal compositions in a sketch or directly on the canvas. A feeling of a correct palette for the subject arises in the beginning stages of painting. This original color theme modulates throughout the process of painting. Over the years, the artist has been applying paint in more loose and fluid layers. This is an unintended result from decades of meditation, where seeing movements of the mind lead to handling of the medium with lightness and movement. During this time, her understanding of pigments grew in new directions. These particles flow in a medium and form into whatever the mind of the artist directs them to be. Her background in fine art, art history, and mural painting gave her practical experience in color analysis, pigment analysis, color matching, etc.. As time went on, she picked up the challenge of working with metallic pigments because of their visually unstable and translucent qualities. They cannot be fixed into one single appearance. This happens with individual pigment particles as well as the overall image. These most recent paintings with metallic pigment shift and move in a way similar to the reality outside the canvas that is also animated and changing. The translucent qualities of the material allow the viewer to see the brushstrokes that form the final image. It is another way of looking through surfaces. These paintings reflect and dance with the light of their environment, and so they are a two dimensional expression that is interacting with the outside world. It is a step forward in Iyekudo’s theme of reflection. Her work is contemplations of individual lives, a city reflected in water, and these themes reflected onto canvases. It is a visual form of understanding what is reflected in the mind.