Allison Stewart's transition from a biology
major who wanted to create black-and-white drawings for medical textbooks
to an expressionist painter whose watery dreamscapes are colorful, vibrant,
and anything but sterile is not as strange as it may seem.
Stewart moved to the Deep South to attend college in Mobile.
And while her classroom training brought her an appreciation for how the human body works, her
affinity for local topographies led her to translate her scientific
knowledge into an intuitive feeling for ecosystems as living bodies that
can get sick or be wounded and even die, but which can also be cured.
Now a resident of New Orleans, she creates pictures inspired by those
bodies, specifically the Louisiana wetlands, hoping her work will
contribute to their healing by celebrating their fragile beauty.
Louisiana wetlands, she says, are "not
quite water, not quite land, and even before Hurricane Katrina, they were
eroding at an alarming rate. I paint about how man and nature work and,
sometimes, don't work together -- that uneasy balance."
Arthur Roger, who represents Stewart in his New Orleans gallery, describes her
work as "so exquisite that you could hardly imagine there's
something political about it." But, he says, "the motivation is
her concern for the erosion of the Louisiana coastline."
