Marsha Nouritza Odabashian
Artist Statement
Palimpsests Series
2000-present
In this series of oil paintings, I have sought to express a metaphorics of transformation and memory. The paintings deploy and juxtapose images inspired by modern children’s book illustrations, European folk tales, and the detritus of contemporary global culture with motifs taken from the traditions of medieval Armenian manuscripts and architecture, traditions that combine a complex religious iconology with often exuberant and formal jeux d’esprit. Recombining and transforming such diverse cultural elements in the interplay of large and small-scale figures, human, phytomorphic, theriomorphic, architectonic and chimeric elements, expressed in explosions of pigment, gesso in low relief, and thin glazes of paint, I both situate myself in a particular psychological, social and cultural context and invite the viewer to apprehend this complex of representations in the light of her/his own imaginative experiences.
Artist Statement
Palimpsests Series
2000-present
In this series of oil paintings, I have sought to express a metaphorics of transformation and memory. The paintings deploy and juxtapose images inspired by modern children’s book illustrations, European folk tales, and the detritus of contemporary global culture with motifs taken from the traditions of medieval Armenian manuscripts and architecture, traditions that combine a complex religious iconology with often exuberant and formal jeux d’esprit. Recombining and transforming such diverse cultural elements in the interplay of large and small-scale figures, human, phytomorphic, theriomorphic, architectonic and chimeric elements, expressed in explosions of pigment, gesso in low relief, and thin glazes of paint, I both situate myself in a particular psychological, social and cultural context and invite the viewer to apprehend this complex of representations in the light of her/his own imaginative experiences.