When looking over the paintings of Slowey-Raguso, you may come across a figure you recognize from Greek mythology: perhaps Artemis, Daphne, or Apollo. Then again, you might also see Albert Einstein’s thinking, Joan of Arc’s determination, or a might blue whale in harmony with the oceans. The artist’s fantastic mix of imagery- derived from myths, science, and personal experience- emanates from a personal pantheon that illustrates what Slowey-Raguso calls a “humanistic conviction of faith". Ancient stories, Catholic notables, and flash insights from the artist’s lucid dreams also make appearances in her charmingly idiosyncratic and almost psychedelically vivid works.

In one recent canvas, A Sign in the Sky of Something Somewhere Else, a yellow octopus with red spots sprawls in the lower left, unfurling its tentacles, an emblem of limited, deadly beauty. Beyond it, a Fibonacci spiral winds towards a distant vast universe (Orion) overseen by a dolphin and her calf, a symbol of motherly intelligence. Mathematically charged rectangles, filled with strong colors of emerald green, deep blue and bright yellow ground the composition. Adding to the pure sensation of the piece, the effects of bright oil colors are supplemented by other materials: crystals, gold leaf and flocking.

Slowey-Raguso explains the inherently mathematical (and abstract) underpinnings of her art in this way:

I have a firm conviction that a painting can be composed to bring a person a sense of awe and wonder by a visual, in your face composition. Kind of like a collective unconscious of Jung but not cerebral but visual when we pick up a seashell and see it as beautiful; why is a “perfect rose” perfect? A symphony is different from a waltz because of some innate, underlying structure. In my painting, these structures lie in numbers: Fibonacci and the geometric manifestation of Fibonacci, a Logarithmic spiral, not the “rule of thirds.” The law of chance is also married to it and can be understood by the patterns, or un-patterns, in fractals.

Taking from a variety of myths and assembling her own is Slowey-Raguso’s ongoing personal project. “Your life and time,” she explains, “can appear in a painting to help you feel again why you felt a certain way in the past.” It is that sense of underlying emotion, transmitted through personal symbols, that charges each painting with its singular beauty. The artist and painter is a creator who is infinitely moved by Creation and who has found a way to share that sense of awe through her art.

John Seed
Oct 2020