Traveling has always been the genesis of a kind of mold-making process for me. Its experiences witness a moment and then compile lists, record tracings of the road, generate patterns, and bring along a series of tasks to be dredged from multiple encounters.

So it was with these paintings. A stick, a mudrock, and a trip to the Anza Borrego desert pushed my prior life as a printmaker and sculptor into the mode of painting interiorscapes.

Returning to Davis, California, I watched the rice fields on fire, like those previous cultures that burned forests and fields to purge and purify. Thus began my exploration of painted fragmented memories, and family histories, which commenced where my printmaking training had etched process into my methods. Watercolor seemed to be the most fluid medium to use, and not to be distracted with the emotion of color, kept the boundaries formal but the interior a tangle of carefully traversed edges, canyons of bleeding pigments, worked from the same vantage as a photorealist might study the detail from a photograph. Inspired by my aunt who interpreted predigital imagery for the CIA, the work grew more like a mapping process, than traditional painting.

This was the last journey of fully abstracted adventure, using the stick as my Don Quixote, prior to the move to full-blown figuration that occupied the latter half of my art career at American River College.

It is my hope that this work might parallel a path that starts with a fleeting thought or observation but melts and pours into a lifelong intellectual crucible to chase that evanescent matter out from the thicket of life.

Pamela Maddock

September 21, 2021, Austin, TX