Nothing for Stryk goes unnoticed. For decades she has recorded her experiences with nature in sketchbooks that are as much journals of her walks around her home in Bristol, Virginia, as they are ornithological documentations of a certain species of bird lying dead, or a feather found.
Minute details trigger an urge to record, and often later become part of a painting. For the last four years the artist has become absorbed with bird imagery where parts (feathers, eggs, nests) become metaphoric stand-ins for bird and echoes of human trappings. Like the enigmatic Rosetta Stone, Stryk’s beautiful mixed media panels invite close investigation, beckoning decipherment of a personal iconography.
Stryk insists we are all collectors in some way, that we share an impulse to order and control the natural world. The artist demonstrates her collector persona in her meticulously painted and structured compositions: in the antenna of a beetle or the shift of hues and patterns from egg to egg. She is as much a sculptor as a painter, teasing fibers from a bird’s nest to render them tactile or scratching notations into her gesso that are part science, part poetry, and all obsession. Pairing text and image, the viewer enters an imaginary dialogue, piecing through the many visual tropes whose humble beginnings may have been a walk in the woods one late afternoon.On the luminous stage of these works,
On the luminous stage of these works, Stryk paints with a skill of calm control. Just as she organizes the organic, so too do we separate ourselves from the disorder of the natural world in our architecture, our automobiles, our central heating, our clothing. Yet, in Stryk’s mind, the division is false: Safely protected in our homes, she describes, we pride ourselves in overcoming the hazards of wildness, yet deep in the spiraling chains of every cell in our bodies is wildness itself. The language Stryk reveals to us is not a separate voice but our own.
