Madeline Sherry

"My figurative work is a social commentary on the times I have lived in as well as the influences from my Jewish parents on me and my grandparents who emigrated here from Russia and who lived both through the depression and World War II. With that as a backdrop, my paintings muse on highly personal events that traumatized my family during my childhood, but because of the times we lived in (i.e. McCarthyism, fear of the bomb and communist expansion, and terror of familial scandal) we all learned to cope by putting a “happy face” on the most perverse of events. The happy family, happy couple scenes I paint often obscure these political, social or personnel dramas of the time. My evolving feminism also is subtle in my images of women who lived through the feminist suppression of the 1940's and 1950's. Again, I try to engage the viewer to figure out the real meaning of the image. My abstract paintings begin with no real plan, but evolve organically as I strive to balance color, form, composition, and movement. When I look at these painting years later, I often discover forms that I more fully realize in my figurative work later on, oddly enough. Because of the way I create abstract ideas, my paintings can become quite large with multiple canvases involved before I resolve an image. It occurs to me that the type of persons who will resonate with my images, who lived through the same things I did, are becoming fewer and fewer. History is important. My work captures the roots of transparency and acceptance of the kind of social mores and political ideas we take for granted today, and conveys to the millennials the context of how far we have come as a society." - Madeline Sherry