LIIDLII KUE/FORT SIMPSON
Marion Storm's paintings are never finished.

Marion Storm gave an artist's talk at the Open Sky gallery on April 7 for community members interested in her exhibit, Pareidolia: The Inner Journey, which is currently on display at the gallery. - photo courtesy of Roxanna Thompson

Even while dozens of her pieces hang in an exhibit at the Open Sky Gallery in Fort Simpson, she is working on more.

The acrylic artist has been working in her medium for 15 years, developing her techniques and learning what makes acrylic artwork tick. Her most recent adventure is Pareidolia: The Inner Journey, which is currently up for display at Open Sky.

"They're not finished. They just are an ongoing conversation, and it comes to a point where I have to physically say, 'That's it - it's told me now what it's going to say,' " Storm said.

"It's almost like a sentence or a paragraph - it has a complete thought ... It's time to let it go and I'll have to turn it around or put it in another place, otherwise I'll just keep working on it."

Pareidolia refers to the phenomenon of seeing familiar things - faces, animals and objects - in patterns.

That happens when cloud-watchers search for shapes in the sky or when the study of a wood grain or the moon reveals an arrangement that looks like a face.

"It's in our brain anyway ... We see things. That's Pareidolia: we see things that are significant to our experiences and who we are. And that's what the paintings do," Storm said.

"I love them. They just speak to me all the time - and anybody can do it."

For Storm, the inner journey her paintings connect to the soul.

They are a reflection of dreams and emotion.

"(They are) a way of connecting to that part of us that is showing us where we're putting our energies. If we see something scary in a painting, that is saying something about us," Storm said.

Her own exhibit has its fair share of scary paintings. She recalls one that appears to be a woman with a mask on, with a stake in her eye, kneeling down - painted in harsh colours.

"That felt so good to paint, because it was an emotion that needed to be acknowledged. And once it was out, it was out and it was fine," she said.

"(Those types of paintings) are scary because when I was doing them, I was in an anxious state. But I value those just as much as I value the loving, kind, wonderful ones that take me into this meditative state. They're just as important."

Her experiences with her paintings came up as a topic of conversation during an artist's talk she gave at the gallery the evening of April 7. But she said she does not want her own interpretation to rob others of experiencing the paintings in their own way.

"One of the complications of painting is people want you to tell them what you're thinking when you're painting, and expect to see the same things and have the same feelings. But it doesn't work that way," she said.

"Truly, the paintings speak for themselves in the way the viewer brings their own experiences and what's important to them, where they're spending their energies. They will find it within the painting."

There are tricks to acrylics Storm has learned over the years: contrasting warm and cool colours, layering bright colours so they don't darken as much when they dry. But one of the keys to her technique is the abstract nature of her artwork.

"The paintings are painted in such a way I don't know what I'm painting. I just have a way of organizing how I paint, and allowing chaos to make its way until it starts to speak to me," she said.

The order and chaos in her paintings are often connected, as she works on a dozen pieces at the same time.

"If you could see my downstairs, I have probably about 12 paintings that are still in the process of - quote unquote - 'speaking to me,' " she said with a laugh.

"This is the cool thing. I go downstairs every weekend and I look at all those 12 paintings, and one of them will say something to me. One of them, I know what I can do - and that will inspire me to do that to the next one ... They're all connected in the same way."

Pareidolia is up for viewing indefinitely at the Open Sky Gallery.

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