My name is Caitlin Aasen.

I am an artist enjoying the world through various aqueous mediums and vivid pigments.

The ordinary world, full of rich vibrant color that surrounds me also inspires. Mark Rothko once said paradoxically, that “though the transcendental must involve the strange or unfamiliar not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.” My own sense of color, be it the hue of a familiar or exotic plant a muddy puddle in the street or a unique skin tone constitute a mysterious visual vocabulary replenished and updated every time I sketch, or pick up a brush. My paintings are not precisely about color or formal relationships but attempt to express basic human emotions and here I feel an affinity with Rothko’s interest in what he calls:  “tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on…” In my paintings I try to embody an emotion or feeling that arose in a specific situation. I want the viewer to be embraced by color as if they could dive in and swim through pools of color and waves of tints and shadows, these otherwise ordinary banal things so familiar to us like Blue or Red and Yellow or Green become extraordinary in some way. My working method begins on un-stretched canvas approached as if there was a near infinite ability to scroll from left to right. After working the canvas I tear away the un-sized edges. Because there is no set destination for my painting, I feel that more of myself can then flow into the work: my eye, hand and ‘heart’ in equal measure. Like the reader of a scroll, I have a vague feeling of a direction but never a strict map. There is no need to dwell on the destination but instead concentrate on the process.