Betsy Damos
My work is about choice-making and risk-taking. Early work was about personal choice-making. This quickly evolved into thinking about collective choice-making and risk-taking.
For over three decades my two-dimensional work and sculpture have addressed environmental issues. This theme is consistent throughout my work in the CAH eMuseum collection. The pieces reflect my love of, and concern for, the natural environment. Beginning with alarm regarding the loss of habitat for animals, it led to thinking more about issues such as sprawl, and other types of development displacing nature. My works on paper and the paintings are intended to highlight the beauty of the natural environment, it's fragility and the complexity of issues such as sprawl and the resettlement of people.
Each of the pieces in the work currently in the CAH eMuseum contains some kind of layering, often leaving only small areas of the initial drawing untouched. Some in the series contain the color “rose”, which came about with thoughts that we sometimes want to see what is happening around us through “rose-colored” glasses. This association with the color rose is used prominently in “For Better or Worse-For Richer or Poorer.”
In many pieces I have worked with a process that mimics the message. The original bottom layer of imagery was usually a section cut from a wall-sized drawing/painting on paper that I have done of forest land. Often, but not always, this section of the larger paper image was adhered to a stretched canvas. This then became the working surface. Other times, the paper surface is the only material, and these pieces are framed under glass. In each case, by drawing and painting over the images, I have obliterated, or reinforced parts of the original. To me, this parallels the “race” between the effort to preserve the natural environment and sometimes potentially destructive change brought about by human development and resettlement.
In most of my work, including my sculpture, hard-edged elements play against more organic, soft forms. This was my way of highlighting conflicts, but also a suggestion of hope -- that with care, the natural and the built environment can respectfully coexist.
Most of my two-dimensional work is done in series, each often relating to and building upon the previous one, but always exploring new thoughts and pushing the medium with each series.
