A Rose for My Faithful Fiend, Collage on Medal , 11 x 11, Blotter, Custom Frame 2005

A Rose for A Friend by Inez Storer is oil on medal with mixed media. It is 11 x 11 and mounted on a wooden display box so there i s no need for a frame.This painting has been in posesion of the gallery since purchase and is in excellent condition. Biography: Searching through “artifacts” for source material is a way of accessing my process and painting procedure. This terrain informs my work which often leads me to return to my own history, which was filled with many persistent secrets and untold stories, the result of growing up in a household full of mystery…parents who came from Europe and wanted to “erase” and assimilate. Specifics were left out and my art making from my earliest memories was a way of making up my own visual stories. The use of collage, bits and pieces has also been a part of my palette. More recently I have been “channeling” selected artists who have been a part of my “art family” who act as a “surround”. Maybe it is a way of creating my own “community”…Matisse, Piero della Francesca, Robert Rauschenberg , Florine Stettheimer and the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatava have come into the pentimento of my painting history. I often leave written clues through the use of words…a narrative, and/or my own text. Many years ago when this all started, I happened upon an abandoned house nearby which seemed to call for some “investigation”, (criminal tendencies). The owners apparently left everything behind when the place partially burned down many years prior. I did wait for a time before I embarked on a unique adventure to make sure that they did not return. Rain and certainly time had “aged and “stained” what was inside; there were journals, photos, objects known and unknown, mementos, many reaching back to the mid-19th century. It was better than a flea market (artists often shop to help “kick start” their process). Here was an abundant gathering of collage material and amazing fuel for my ongoing studio practice. My constant “hunts” either flea marketing or other endeavors, helps to invent my own history. Making art is the evolutionary way to engage, from palette to paint to surface The challenge of “staying in place” somehow gives me an incentive to “roam” around my studio in search of relevant material, be it paper images, objects or even venture forth on sporadic short “journeys” to visit the wild ocean very near where I live. With drawers full of disparate and even organized various images, my art explorations can take form. It is a wide and wild range of a “tool box! It can be possible to organize a new visual world and a mandate to try to somehow shut out the ever present and shattering experience that surrounds our present condition. Occasionally, I feel that I just caught the “brass ring” while going round and round the Merry-Go-Round of our precarious lives. When 911 happened quite a few of my artist friends called to ask what I was doing. I almost sheepishly replied that I was “art making”, that it was the only way I could think of responding…being in a state of numbness. All agreed that they too were doing the same thing as a way of coping. Maybe it was a kind of process of making sense of our present existence. It is imperative to put one foot in front of the other. Today! I am surprised to experience what transpires. It seems OK!