Peacock Waterfall

In Pat Steir’s Waterfall series, she uses the liquidity of her medium to unify gesture, composition and image. Incorporating gravity into the work, she creates rivulets of drips that either fall vertically or are suspended, capturing the range of gravity’s effects. These works are both illusionistic images of a waterfall and physical records of liquid following the force of gravity. The loose brushwork and the introduction of a drip-like technique are inspired by Jackson Pollock. Steir’s use of water as a motif has universal meaning. It represents the unconscious, the feminine, life, abundance, flow, fluidity, form and the formless. Steir’s Waterfall series expresses the generative force from which the cosmos emerges.