The paintings of Inez Storer take the viewer on a magical journey through history, sensation, and internal experience. They are multi-layered and full of artifacts of the artist's life and interests. The paintings are richly textured and woven, both in their physical properties and in their associations across layers of time. They have elements of both dark and light, depicting colorful, expansive lives and things that go bump in the night.
Inez Storer was born in 1933 in Santa Monica, California. She studied at the Art Center in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California at Berkeley, and the San Francisco College for Women, ultimately receiving her B.A. from Dominican University in San Rafael, California (1970). She received her M.A. from San Francisco State University (1971).
Storer's work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions consistently throughout the United States at institutions such as the Reno Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Monterey Museum of Art, the Fresno Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Missoula Museum of Art, Montana, and The National Museum of Jewish History, Philadelphia. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the country. Storer has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute (1981 - 1999), Sonoma State University (1976 - 1988), San Francisco State University (1970 - 1973), and the College of Marin (1968 - 1979). She has received numerous grants and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1999, and has worked twice as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome (1997, 1996). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, the Lannan Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University.
You can see Inez's painting "7 Days to Make the World" on display now at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco.
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 Akhmatova 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 the palette to paint to the 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!