Artist Statement
I am a visionary and narrative artist who is inspired by myths, dreams and storytelling. My practice tends to focus on communicating with other worlds - internal and external, and obsessively exploring dreams and other alternate states of being. Through this, I tend to be drawn to divinatory practices, deep meditation, metaphors, rituals, animism, and symbolism. I have a multi-disciplinary practice but my primary works are my oil paintings which have a mythological, story-like quality to them. They depict a world where the animals are central, the humans are just another animal, and everything has sentience - the landscape, the trees, the rocks, the sky.
I do not intend that each painting I create stands alone as a linear story. Instead they are meant to be seen as part of a whole, where each one adds to the collective narrative, of an alternate world that keeps expanding and gaining definition the more that I paint. I rarely begin with a sketch or storyline, which makes me feel like a conduit that this larger story passes through, so that I can bring each aspect of it to life. While I know these images come from outside of me, I also know they are simultaneously shaped as they pass through me, exploring elements of my own rocky passage through this world.
I like that the symbolism and stories within my paintings have an archetypal quality to them that prompts people to respond to my paintings with personal stories of their own. I also like the feeling that I have access to an alternate reality just under the surface of this world. One where animals get to live out their own stories without so much human interference. One with fleeing and reprieve, temporary safe havens, lands that contain vast homes for various creatures, portals and passages and roads all leading to the next place.
Bio
Abigail Lee Goldberger is a narrative artist, born in Boston, Massachusetts. She currently lives in San Francisco, California and works out of Art Explosion Studios on Alabama street in the Mission District. She has been featured in solo shows and has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and art fairs across the US. She is a member of City Art Gallery in the Mission District of San Francisco and does select monthly showings there. She is the creator of the evolving interactive web-based art project, The Oracle of Dreams, oracleofdreams.org. Her first book, ‘The Doorway Inside the Cat’, was published in March of 2020 and features all five of the stories in her illustrated story series. She is the founder and director of Sheepscot Arts Preserve, an artist residency center in Midcoast Maine that supports Visionary, Outsider and Narrative artists of all disciplines.