Spotlight: Abstract Painting

Artist Statement

This body of work spans two years, two studios, one life milestone, and three types of substrates. Mostly made with acrylic or water based media, I’ve worked away from painting on paper towards harder, more resistant substrate, with simpler, objective based compositions. Gesture has moved away from its central role in my work. This selection shows an effort towards a more solid compositional footing.

Much of the work is an effort to visually harmonize spatial ambivalence; how does a form exist in two planes at once? The effort is not so much to reconcile as it is to live with the contradictory. I push the compositions to balance a suspension of disbelief and a tangible acknowledgment of a made object. The dichotomy of drawn and painted treatments takes advantage of the depth and atmosphere implied by wet, amorphous forms and planes.  Rigid lines and shapes encounter these surfaces, holding up, constraining, destabilizing, and contradicting their preceding natural flow. The dialog between these tense boundaries and the soft, moving forms establishes its own environment.

I am compelled by a clumsy and imperfect nature of painting, especially in relationship to a more perfect, cold language of drawing. The precise and angular nature of many of the forms I work with lend themselves to a technical vernacular. I leave proof of artifice; trusting my hand to waiver from perfect lines, and likewise building shapes or planes that are too sharp to read in the proposed physical space. My hand invariably invades the illusion.