The work of Sarabeth Dunton offers an escape to imagined landscapes through her unwavering use of small repetitive marks. Her studio is filled with partial drawings and small groups of images collected from cell-phone snapshots and Google searches. Image particles are the ideal starting point: sunsets, fire, Baroque paintings with theatrical compositions, apartment plants, and ornate cabinetry. Her visual collections lay the groundwork for Dunton’s compositions and guiding themes. She draws from a desire to reflect and realign our relationship to images.
Once the hundreds of Prismacolor pens come out, these images are put away, so that recollection is more important than replication. Dunton reacts intuitively as she creates her compositions in response to an image group. On blank paper, a wide tipped marker dances in broad painterly strokes on the surface. The stage is set with these improvisational marker strokes, and from there Dunton fills up the space with an array of smaller controlled marks.
Neo-Neoclassicisms: Basilica is a pink and red glowing landscape filled with mountains and earth strata that emerge between shades of blue-grey. Framed by a black theatrical proscenium, the viewer enters a dripping wet world of small icy interruptions. Bright pinks, in contrast with more muted hues, open a pathway only to be caught in the web of intense hatching. The viewer may discover a jutting ship’s mast, the direction of a staircase, or the near slippage of cave-like stalagmites. The forms melt into one another as molten color bleeds into the black frame reminding us that “all the world’s a stage.”
In a scene reminiscent of the Blasted Lands in World of Warcraft, a multiplayer online fantasy game, Dunton’s Neo-Neoclassicisms: Golden Bough opens a window into a cavernous space with brightly colored canyons scarred with explosions of pink and black. The explorative nature of the drawing and its fantastical depth reflects both on Dunton’s source imagery and also her experience living nomadically for several years across the United States. In a previous body of work, Dunton created drawings of specific objects she was selling or donating from her home. This cathartic purge connected to her love of the non-specific. The viewer can enter their own nomadic adventure in her works, devoid of specific ties to the tangible material world, thus a synthesis of experiences creates a new world to explore.
In two other poetically titled works, That winter i dreamt of mazes and the library. It was dark most days and i read too much Borges, and When it rained the water would come inside in small spurts through a round opening...might be a bullet hole, the landscapes are disorienting, overgrown, more akin to the post-apocalyptic. Broken diagonal segments resemble shattered black glass. Colorful patches of moss grow out of architectural fissures on imagined structures left to decay. Here, there are no dedicated points of entry, but still many places exist where the viewer can discover new narrative quest lines in a sea of marks.
– Melaney Mitchell