Emily Persson

"Three Lemons and the Last Supermoon" impasto still life/interior oil painting

2023

In the trompe l'oeil panel painting, "Wonder, or the Plane of the Invisible," a comic cut-out of Wonder Woman sits between two spatial planes—the top, very flat plane is cut out in the shape of a plane as a play Wonder Woman's famous "Invisible Plane." The silly way the comic book character would sit in an imaginary seat flying through the air would force the artist to wonder, “how do you represent an invisible plane”. Here, we see a bright blue canvas, sprinkled with glittery paillettes; an outline of an airplane beneath an outline of the word “SKY”, an infantile depiction of the sun made of masking tape, and finally, the hero, Wonder Woman, her comic clipping taped onto the invisible plane. A very believable, naturalist blue sky with puffy white clouds is visible through the letters and the invisible airplane. It feels like we can reach into the invisible plane to find the natural world…yet atop the plane is an old cartoon of the first female superhero. She overlaps the realistic atmosphere, and even casts a shadow onto it. The planet’s orbit is dedicated to the sun, and all living things need the light to survive…yet this most important element is made up of a crude array of tape strips, asymmetrical, and even torn in-half. This sun refers back to Pablo Picasso’s sun...

"Nasturtium, Diptych" is an abstract diptych painting of two potted plants. On the lefthand canvas the background is painted a thin hookers green and resin was poured over the top. The potted flower is painted over the resin, sitting on a white stippled table with a thick yellow edge. Yellow stipples are painted around the plant. The righthand painting has intentionally exposed canvas soft smudges of green paint through the middle of the canvas and navy up in the upper lefthand corner, at the middle of the composition. A heavy impasto flower...