Paintings

Around 1980 Audette became intrigued by the shapes and colors of scrapped cars in a rural automobile junkyard. After introducing herself to the yard’s owner and showing examples of her work, she was granted access to the property. Wandering through the stacks of junked vehicles, she was drawn to how their shapes became abstracted, how their exposure to the elements affected their colors, and how age caused surface deterioration. Her interest in scrapped automobiles soon expanded to junked ships, planes, trains and other obsolete heavy machinery.

Audette spent a great deal of time visiting scrapped machinery sites, looking for engaging imagery and compelling angles. Formal relationships and perspective played important roles in Audette’s compositions. She looked for juxtaposed machine elements, such as one vehicle in front of another or a view into a train yard between two box cars in the foreground. She also took an interest in more intimate subjects like a detail of a railcar coupling or a close up of a truck hubcap. As the places she visited were often restricted, she relied on photography to capture her impressions. Upon returning to her studio, she would use the photographs for reference, making sketches of shapes and forms, often altering position, size and scale to create dynamic compositions. To express the monumentality of her subject matter, Audette developed canvases at grand scale.