Art and science both strive to understand the world around us, albeit through different approaches. While artists often explore subjective interpretation and emotional expression, scientists typically employ empirical observation and systematic investigation. Abstract reasoning is an integral component of the creative process and artistic expression. It provides the cognitive flexibility required to move beyond the obvious and the concrete, allowing for the exploration and expression of deeper, multifaceted ideas — recognizing patterns, making connections, and trying to understand complex relationships. It enables us to make leaps in understanding that aren't based solely on what we see.

 
With a focus on form, color and line, Alyson Schultz's body of work utilizes an expressive visual vocabulary. An attention to the physical immediacy of paint combines with strong, gestural expressiveness to create fragments of an urban reality. Their genesis springboards from site specific imagery, and interprets it in a new context, transforming the source into an artwork that conveys something the raw data may not convey. Each painting undergoes a history of its own, as layers are added, scraped, overpainted, built and rebuilt — the paintings evolve from depiction to a more personal, evocative terrain. 

“The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity. It's our attempt as humans to build an understanding of the universe, the world around us.”
--Dr. Mae Jemison
 

About the artist:

Alyson Schultz creates abstract paintings and drawings from her Vernon Street Studio in Somerville, Massachusetts. With a background in printmaking, a BFA from Southeastern Massachusetts University and a MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, her postgraduate career has embraced painting on large scale door panels, making the experience for the viewer one-on-one. Alyson is a founding member of the Brickbottom Artist Building, one of the country’s first and
largest artist-developed live-work buildings.

An early review remains pertinent today. Addison Parks wrote, “Standing outside a panting is like facing a barrier. We are on the outside. Something is on the inside. Alyson Schultz recognizes this and uses it. She turns into reality something which might otherwise just be a metaphor. Her paintings document a process, and a struggle, one we all face every day, but in art as well.... Alyson Schultz makes something happen with her paintings that is a kind of a realism. By recreating the process of building up and knocking down what are all at once fences, filters, bar, masks, and facades, she is acting out something we all do, and will continue to do. It is a vicious cycle, but also nature. Human nature. She makes it a noble endeavor.”

Image caption: Ladder. Image courtesy of the artist.